A recent article in the Atlantic raised alarm bells on the demise of retail jobs, observing that “retail employment is following a familiar path, one already beaten by farmers and factory workers”. However, pronouncing the death of the traditional retail job is not necessarily the same as pronouncing the death of retail. Certainly for luxury retail, new technologies and e-commerce present new opportunities to re-imagine the function of bricks-and-mortar stores.
Essentially, if e-commerce does a better job of handling transactions, retailers need to reframe their physical spaces as places where higher-value activities can take place, going beyond inventory turnovers and margins on products. E-commerce could play an important role even in bricks-and-mortar store, possibly even taking care of the handling and delivering of goods. This would allow retailers to use precious square footage to showcase their products and enable clients to experience them. The classic example is Apple where vast swathe of their store space is given over to long tables where its products are available for sampling. Baccarat experimented with a similar model with its Baccarat bar where clients could experience its crystal ware in a beautiful environment. Luxury retailers are well placed to embrace “showrooming” – the idea that consumers come into bricks-and-mortar store to experience a product and then order it online – because unlike mass retailers, there is a greater sensory element to their products.
By extension, this means reconsidering the human resource embedded in these stores. For luxury retailers, sales representatives have often played the role of brand ambassadors yet they are still rewarded based on sales. These firms could push the envelope further in regard to their retail teams. Let them focus not on selling the product but in maximizing the ways in which a client might try or experience the product. Serve tea in the firm’s signature china, invite clients to sit on the hand-crafted sofas that can later be purchased and delivered to anywhere in the world without a trip to the cash register and invite clients into the stores to try the very coats and dresses they just saw on the runway. The salesman might be dead but the brand experience (and the brand ambassador) lives on.