Fortune has a good article about the Apple Stores: Apple: America’s best retailer
Some interesting bits:
Saks…generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 – tops for electronics retailers – while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666… But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.
It shouldn’t surprise me that Apple built a prototype of a store before actually opening them. That seems like something all retailers would do.
“One of the best pieces of advice…was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product.
And just like Apple pays attention to the details in their software and products, they do the same in their stores:
“We’ve gotten it down so there’s only three materials we’re using [in the interiors]: glass, stainless steel, and wood,” says Johnson. “We spent a year and a half perfecting that steel. Stainless steel can be cold if you don’t get the finish right. See the bounce? See the blues up there?” No, frankly, but Apple hunted down a Japanese supplier and pushed it to achieve the effect by blasting the metal with small beads.
