Google goes offline
What: Google opens its first ever permanent space to sell its home products
Why it is important: The retail approach taken is radically different from its peers from the Tech world, by being immersive and enabling customers to project themselves in the usage of the product, just like what Ikea does. It's all about experience, not products.
Google is opening its first 500 sqm brick & mortar store in New York dedicated to its hardware division, designed by Reddymade architects and located below its NY headquarters.
Large windows are homes to cubes that show various product exhibits, in example of real-life usages, by mimicking interiors. Inside the store, spaces are divided and reproducing, again, parts of interiors: a living room, a kitchen… to show and test on site the products. Workshops can be held in a theatre-like space fitted with giant screens and cube-shaped seating units. Or course, the store is also taking into account all safety issues to comply with customers expectations (contactless payment and information, pickup services, etc…), sustainable features (LEED certification, flooring made with recycled bottles, energy-efficient lightbulbs…) and similarly to Apple, will also propose to customers sessions of information and (and this is new) also to repair their broken products.
Overall, Google replicates the environments people would naturally use its products in, just as it did with its previous popups . Interestingly, the approach is radically different from Apple, Samsung or Huawei who prefer to enhance their products by putting them on large, clear tables, rather than reproducing interiors.
According to WWD, Google aims to use the location as a showroom, to help people use its technology, rather than pushing sales, like "an interactive museum". Tech-oriented media Fast Company is quicky in asking if this new retail venture is here to last, when pointing out that many risks have been kept under control: the store is in a building owned by Google, where employees can keep a close eye on what is going on. Analysts see this new initiative as a trial balloon more than a retail launch.
Google Introduces First Physical Store in NYC
Google goes offline (pictures)