Everything you need to know about Amazon’s first physical clothing store

ericana at Brand, a shopping centre in Los Angeles, and reportedly be around 30,000 square feet – much smaller than a typical department store, which is around 100,000 square feet.  Amazon did not say how many Amazon Style stores it plans to open in total, but recent years have seen the company steadily increase its investment in physical retail. It acquired upscale US grocery chain Whole Foods in 2017, and now operates multiple bricks-and-mortar bookstores, 4-star stores (which stock a range of highly rated products) and Amazon Go convenience stores.  “This is about expanding their technology into the physical retail space,” Louise Grimmer, a retail researcher and senior lecturer in marketing at the Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, told Inside Retail. “It’s also about creating and accessing a new market of consumers who like to shop for clothes in physical stores and online, and who are comfortable using technology to enhance the shopping experience.” Here is everything you need to know about Amazon Style – from how it works to what it means for the competition. How Amazon Style works Amazon Style claims to be a “new way” to shop and discover fashion. Rather than having racks full of the same clothes in multiple sizes, it will feature display items with QR codes that customers can scan to see sizes, colours, overall customer ratings and additional product details using the Amazon Shopping app.  Customers will be able to tap a button in the app to add an item to their fitting room or, if they don’t need to try it on, send it directly to the pickup counter. This approach will allow Amazon Style to stock more than double the number of styles as a traditional store of its size. As customers scan items that catch their eye, Amazon’s machine learning algorithm will make real-time personalised recommendations – and send them to the customer’s fitting room to try on alongside their own selections. Customers will also be able to share information like their style, fit and other preferences to receive more refined recommendations.  Once in the fitting room, customers will be able to use touchscreens to rate items and request more styles and sizes to be delivered in just minutes, thanks to advanced technologies and processes borrowed from Amazon’s fulfilment centres. Other innovations to be embedded in the store include complex inventory management systems, new technology to support customer service and Amazon One, a palm recognition service, for fast and convenient checkout. Employees will also be on hand to provide customer service, deliver items to fitting rooms, merchandise the store to inspire discovery, help customers at checkout, manage back-of-house operations and more. Winners and losers By using technology to offer more choice and better service than traditional department stores, Amazon Style has the potential to disrupt the struggling sector.  “We’ve seen a steady decline in product range and in customer service in department stores around the globe and Amazon is looking to capitalise on the gap that has been created by the promise of department stores and the actual reality of what they offer consumers,” Grimmer said.  However, it could also benefit department stores if they’re willing to partner with a company that has chipped away at their market share over the past two decades. “Should Amazon choose to productise these technologies and make them available to other retailers (perhaps in exchange for retailers buying into parts of Amazon’s payment ecosystem) this impact may actually be positive for retailers and consumers alike,” Bradley Grinlinton, the retail and consumer products industry lead at Publicis Sapient in ANZ, told Inside Retail. Whether or not the concept succeeds depends largely on the brands Amazon is able to bring on board. It has not shared the names of any labels that it plans to carry in the store. In its blog post, it said they will range from “customer favourites and Amazon exclusives to brands that are new and noteworthy”. “It will be interesting to see exactly which fashion brands will be offered in the Amazon stores – I think this will be one of the challenges for Amazon,” Grimmer said. “If Amazon cannot make the transition to having consumers link the Amazon brand with higher-quality labels, then this whole initiative may become more about the technology and the brands and products on offer, and that won’t end up being successful for Amazon in the long term.”