Apple’s former head of retail on brick and mortar today

When the internet was new and Wi-Fi was not common in retail stores, Apple turned its brick-and-mortar locations into car showroom-like experiences designed to let people try technology products before buying them.

Ron Johnson, Apple’s former head of retail and creator of its in-house tech support team known as the Genius Bar, helped drum up interest in Apple’s stores in a big way in the early 2000s. Johnson built the blueprint for the tech giant’s physical stores, and 25 years later, with nearly 270 stores in the US and more than 500 globally, Apple stores are widely emulated for their customer experience.

Johnson’s book, Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius, is out on September 22, and details the lessons he learned while creating Apple Stores. He spoke with Retail Brew about AI and physical stores today.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What happens to stores with the AI reset in retail?

Technology has always impacted the retail industry. When I had the chance to create the Apple stores back in 2000, there was a big technology that people said would eliminate stores. That was called online shopping, and the reality is online shopping created the rebirth of physical stores, and physical stores have perhaps never been more important in their history than they are today, even though we can also shop online.

AI is another new technology that will change how we shop, but it will not change where we shop. We will always rely on a combination of physical stores and other buying experiences. Early on there was television shopping, there were mail order catalogs; most of that got replaced by online shopping.

AI is a technology that will improve the physical store experience, and it will improve the digital experience. But I don’t think it’ll shift people from physical to digital or digital to physical.

What defined Apple’s in-store strategy in the early 2000s?

No. 1, we’re going to create a store for everyone. That was a big decision because back then, the specialty store was the winner, and most stores were becoming narrower and narrower in terms of the audience they went after. We went after everybody. That required us to locate in high-traffic shopping locations like a physical mall, which had never been done before for technology products because technology products are purchased infrequently.

We built big, beautiful stores, but we built the store differently than anybody else at the time: on an experience. We knew that heading into an age when there would be online stores, online would be great at a transaction. The one thing online couldn’t do back in 2000 was deliver an experience.

Even today, an online agent-supported shopping experience won’t have the physical experience of a store. We built the storeroom experience. We put in a place to get help and called them Genius Bars. We had theaters [so] you could attend presentations. We had 1:1 training classes. We had programs for kids like summer camps and things. These are things you can’t do online. But, more importantly, you could try the product.

You’ve mentioned that the retail shopper today is more demanding than ever. What do you mean?

They are more knowledgeable than ever. They have more access to information than ever. Over time, retail experiences have improved dramatically, but the new bar is the last shopping experience you had.

If I go back to the experience of shopping 25 years ago when we launched the Apple Store, it was very different. If you were out of stock, I didn’t have systems to go find it in another store. We didn’t have technology that could do that. We didn’t have an online store that I could order from and have you pick it up in the store if you wanted it the next day. All these new tools have come that have made shopping a better experience, both online and in the store.

What would it look like if you were to create the Apple Store experience today?

The stores would be the same size…the same design…the same people. The change I would make when people opt in is I would love to have a customer walk in the store and have every employee naturally know how they use their Apple products. The employee could really personalize that experience for each and every customer. 

Wouldn’t it be great if, when a customer walked in the store, I had interacted with that customer before, I got an alert on my phone that said, “Ron’s back,” then you start to build a family among customers? It’s that ability to use technology to improve the human connection between the employee and the customer, and then the employee could offer even better recommendations for people based on how they use their products.