DC Velocity - February 2020

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QI’ve heard you say there’s a differ- ence between search and discovery. Can you elaborate on the distinctions between the two?

A I use “search” when I know what it is that I want. It is really about find, seek, destroy. Get it. Buy it. Whereas “discovery” is something that happens when I don’t know what I want. There are a lot of different ways I can try to be inspired by what it is that I may want. For a lot of us, it is coming through our Instagram feeds. It could be going to a physical place, and it still is probably, in some instances—but to succeed at that, you have to do it really well, time and time again. So that is why I would argue that physical retail is not dead; it is just being re-imagined, such as with pop-up shops. It is not the same all the time. It is not stagnant. It is not in the traditional places where we’ve come to expect it.

QSpeaking of pop-up stores, one of the more interesting examples was the GH Lab, which was a pop-up store that was open only during the fall of 2018. Can you talk about what made it different from a typical retail store?

AThe GH Lab was a partnership between Good Housekeeping magazine and Amazon, facilitated by the Mall of America. Good Housekeeping took out a space in the mall, roughly 3,000 square feet, where it offered a curated selection of home furnishings. The store was set up to allow shoppers to go discover products, but it was done in a way that eliminated the need for physical inventory—there were no shelves stocked with products, for example. It was set up more show-room-style, so you could come in and browse, and if you found something you liked, you could buy it online.

The way they did that was through
the partnership with Amazon. You
walked in the store and opened up
the Amazon app on your phone. If
you saw something you liked, you just
took a picture of the bar code next to
it. You were then taken immediately
to the Amazon web portal, where you
could buy it and make arrangements
to have it delivered to your home.

It is super easy and super straightforward. The thing I love about it is that it just shows how easily anyone can stand up a physical retail operation in today’s day and age with the right combinations of technologies.

QInteresting. Most people are familiar with the Amazon Go chain of cashierless convenience stores. Is that a possible model for the store of the future?