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Overview

With this Melrose store, Nike marketers hoped to balance the personalized experiences of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store with its enhanced customer services, with inventory control determined by on-line shopper preferences. The store had a hip, improvised exterior appearance, with colorful murals by artist Bijou Karman sort of resembling graffiti, covering its corrugated metal siding. Its contrasting rectangular, projecting store windows, projected out purposefully, however, slightly contradicting the rest of the exterior's low-cost, improvisational aesthetic. The interior look of the store, with its polished epoxied floor, conventional displays and exposed ceiling trusswork recalled a more familiar, retail, shopping-mall atmosphere.

Building History

Housed in a retail space erected in 1964, this experimental Nike retail outlet, Nike by Melrose, opened on 07/12/2018 in the trendy Melrose Avenue shopping district of West Hollywood, CA. West Hollywood's demographics were selected because this was a neighborhood filled with well-to-do consumers who spent large sums on fashionable work-out wear. As noted by the Los Angeles Times' swriter Ronald D. White: "The store targets the customer 'who is very fit and exercises often but who cares a lot about how they look,' when they are exercising, said Cathy Sparks, vice president and general manager of Nike direct stores. This store is meant to take everything we know about our customers digitally and, with the new Nike app, use that to elevate their shopping experience,' Sparks said." Sparks noted that rapid inventory turn-over would be driven by online sales trends: "About 15 percent of our apparel and 25 percent of our footwear is going to change every two weeks,' Sparks said. 'That's a really big deal because Nike has never turned around products that quickly; usually it's 30 days to 45 days.'" (See Ronald D. White, "New Nike concept store in midst of loyal customers," Seattle Times, (published first in the Los Angeles Times), 07/13/2018, pp. A12-A13.)

Nike executives hoped to tailor customer services to young, tech-saavy customers. They will be able to text the store if they have questions or problems, get curbside delivery of shoes or apparel (like many restaurants had begun doing by 2018) and can have their clothing tailored to their measurements at the store. Nike's sales app will unlock when a patron approaches to within 100 feet of the store; they can select a shoe and a salesperson will run the shoe out to the customer's car. If the item doesn't fit or they don't like it within 30 days, the store will take the item back without any explanation needed.

The store's internal layout was structured in a new way. Close to the entrance, store managers will stock items that they think the public will like, trying to anticipate local tastes. The back of the store will showcase items already picked as preferences by online and in-person customers from the neighborhood. Nike hoped to localize the retail experience of a multi-national company, by limiting inventory to the preferences of neighborhood consumers.

PCAD id: 22185