Outside of being able to blow money with the click of a button while in your underwear beside your favorite snacks, what are the best reasons to shop online? Convenience. Price comparison. Options. No waiting in lines. Some might even say there are less impulse purchases because you’re not grabbing the goodies near the register while you’re waiting to check out. Further, if you allow it, some sites you shop on keep track of your online behaviors and cater directly to them by offering a custom experience specifically for you.
Picture all of the things you love about online shopping and add trained individuals with knowledge to help with your selection. Nike has that.
While you may still want to purchase a 36-roll package of toilet paper on Amazon and have it delivered directly to your door rather than lugging it around, a sense of culture and community, two things built into Nike’s DNA, are restored with the convenience of online shopping in their inaugural Nike Live store in conjunction with becoming a Nike Plus Member through the Nike app.
Nike Live is a responsive, hyper locally curated, retail space designed to be a geographically specific culture hub. President of Nike Direct, Heidi O’Neill says, “Being a great digital commerce retailer will make us a better retailer. Consumers are shopping online 24/7365 giving us cues and signals all the time.” They’ve taken data from all of their Nike apps and online shoppers in specific locations and created a place that offers the customization of an online shopping experience and brought it to life.
Starting in Los Angeles on Melrose Avenue across the street from Urth Cafe and next to Restoration Hardware (location, location, location!), the first Nike Live store opened last week. “One interesting data point I loved made Melrose feel like the right place. Because of our apps (the Nike app, Nike Running Club app, Nike Training Club app, and SNKRS), our engagement with this neighborhood has been up 48% since last year. That tells you L.A. loves Nike. This neighborhood loves Nike and we want love them back.”
Inside they have a very specific selection of sneakers and apparel made for the residents of L.A. It’s heavily running and training centered with an emphasis on their edgier fashion-minded apparel. L.A. NTC members work out for 125,000 minutes a week. NRC members’ runs average just over 40 minutes with the most runs taking place around 8 AM Saturday morning. Aside from the running and training stats, they found that 1 in 50 pairs of Nike sneakers purchased in L.A. are Nike Cortez. With data points like these, Nike is able to assemble a profile representative of L.A. Nike culture.
Now before your skepticism creeps in about yet another app to download to your phone, this is where all those favorite things about online shopping come in. By being a Nike Plus Member, you can now shop around online, reserve sneakers you want from the Nike Live location, walk into the store, scan your profile barcode within the app and a locker pops open with your shoes waiting for you. From there you can try them on and should you need assistance with training sneakers, a Nike athlete (a Nike store associate) can let you test them on the treadmill situated by the dressing rooms and tell you whether or not the are a good fit. Just because they are popular doesn’t mean they are a match and the athlete can let you know what sneakers (and apparel) will be a best fit for your body, activity level, and fitness goals you’re trying to accomplish.
On the apparel side of things, complimentary tailoring and bra fittings are offered. The data offers Nike insight on the most purchased apparel, and they're going to make sure it fits you. For example, on the women’s side, they’ve stocked the most purchased running tights as well as the pair that consumers re-purchased or own multiples of.
If you know exactly what you’re looking for and the size you want it in, you can reserve products within the app and schedule curbside pick-up. Pull up, send a text and someone will come out with your stuff. You can also use curbside service for returns, which you can do up to 30 days after you purchase your stuff and try it out. Yes, use it and return it—no questions asked.
Further, you can text the Nike Live location at any time for guidance or questions and a trained Nike athlete will respond allowing you to show up informed. Everything is designed to offer a custom, area-specific, informed and individualized experience while aiming for speed and convenience. Even the inventory has a new home in the Live location. The sneaker bar is in the center of the store and holds a majority of the inventory. When you come in without reserving a pair of shoes, you and your athlete will never lose sight of each other in the depths of some endless backroom inventory.
Finally, there are tangible perks with the Live and app combo. Upon setting foot in the Live location, if your location services are turned on, you’ll receive special offers. Athletes can offer rewards from partners like Apple Music or ClassPass, but there’s a special vending machine called the Nike Plus Unlock Box that you can scan your profile barcode and get little gifts. Right now at the new location you can select a pair of Dri-Fit Nike socks of your favored style and size.
“We're definitely going to treat this as a lab. We’re going to learn and be super agile here. We believe in this concept because it’s really built by the members and what they want,” O'Neill shared. Being that the Live model is setup to be hyper responsive to incoming data, the Melrose location will act as a testing space as the program develops. 25% of the inventory is going to change every two weeks. The next location set to open up will be in Tokyo, and in order to make sure the whole neighborhood doesn’t look exactly the same, they have some tentative plans. O'Neill says, “We found London and Tokyo are early leads on what might cascade to L.A. Some ideas we want to play with showing L.A. what trending in Tokyo or showing New York what’s trending in L.A. within the store.” So, they're using the data to cater to the local culture, but they're also sharing what the data says other cities are into.
Not only does Live cater directly to the community within each geographical location they plan to open in, it benefits the Nike team members working there solving problems like endless phone calls about sizes to locations. “We built these tools to help better our athletes, too,” she says. They’ll also be launching a self-checkout option on the app for in-store purchases starting later this year to skip lines and free up the time for their athletes to be spent educating shoppers.
The bottom line is shoppers love to feel special, and while retail stores have kind of been on their deathbed for the past couple years, Nike is offering just that and a solution to the two problems online shopping cannot fix: trying things on and personal, educated service from a living, breathing, highly trained human. And for those of you, unaffected and offline, you can still walk into a Nike Live location, browse, ask for help, pick out your purchases, and head out without as much as a push notification buzzing in your pocket or a Terms of Service agreement check required. And, if you happen to be into what the majority of Los Angeles is interested in, you'll feel like Nike Live is made for you.
