Amazon to Open First Physical Clothing Store

Amazon’s first-ever, brick-and-mortar apparel store, slated to open later this year in Los Angeles, will offer a personalized, digitally enabled shopping experience leveraging the retail giant’s technology and operations. (View video at bottom.)

Product Assortment
Amazon Style will sell a selection of women’s and men’s apparel, shoes and accessories chosen by a team of fashion curators and feedback provided by millions of Amazon.com shoppers. With Amazon’s vast fulfillment center network, Amazon Style’s product assortment will be frequently updated, so customers can discover new items at every visit. The selections will span customer favorites, Amazon exclusives, clothing from emerging designers and brands that are “new and noteworthy,” according to a media release from the retailer.

Reimagined Fitting Rooms
Using the Amazon Shopping mobile app while browsing, shoppers can send items they want to try on to one of more than 30 fitting rooms, where they’ll find the items they requested plus additional options chosen based on their preferences. A touchscreen in each fitting room allows shoppers to browse more options, rate items and request more sizes or styles that can be delivered directly to their room within minutes. Amazon Style uses the same technologies and processes as Amazon’s fulfillment centers to store more items that can be quickly delivered from back-of-house.

Digitally Enabled Shopping Experience
Usingthe Amazon Shopping app, customers can scan an item’s QR code to see sizes, colors, overall customer ratings and additional product details. In addition to sending an item to the fitting room to try on, shoppers can instead send it directly to the pickup counter. Amazon Style will offer more than double the number of styles carried in a traditional store of its size, aiming to make its assortment easier to shop by featuring display items and bringing more looks and less clutter to in-store shopping.

Personalization
Amazon Style is built around personalization and “thoughtful curation,” leveraging machine learning algorithms to produce tailored, real-time recommendations that match a shopper’s budget, fit and style. In addition to scanning items and receiving recommended picks, Amazon Style offers a more tailored experience and refined recommendations to customers who share information like their style, fit and other preferences. Shoppers can also easily view deals in-store that match their preferences in the Amazon app.

Other unique elements and capabilities of Amazon Style include:

• Items scanned at Amazon Style are conveniently saved in the Amazon app, making it easy to revisit and purchase later or easily find more items online from the brands discovered in-store.
• Customers can shop millions of apparel items on Amazon.com, request delivery to Amazon Style and try on items in a fitting room. If an item isn't perfect, customers can return it in-store.
• In-store prices will be the same as on Amazon.com. Plus, customers can view deals in-store that match their preferences in the Amazon app.

Other innovations that enable the experience include new complex inventory management systems, new technology to support customer service and Amazon One, its palm recognition service enabling fast and convenient checkout. The first Amazon Style store will open later this year at The Americana at Brand, a popular shopping destination in greater Los Angeles. 

Amazon Style’s employees will be available to provide customer service, deliver items to fitting room closets, merchandise the store, help customers at checkout and manage back-of-house operations, among other duties.

This isn't Amazon's first stab at creating a brick-and-mortar shopping experience inspired by its digital experience. In 2020, Amazon opened a brick-and-mortar format to deliver a conventional grocery-store experience for shoppers. Measuring 35,000 square feet – typical for a supermarket – the Amazon Fresh store is much larger than the convenience-style Amazon Go locations introduced in 2018 or the Amazon Go Grocery offshoot. The retailer has also tested various physical retail pop-up concepts at malls in which it merchandises rotating, themed collections, like Mattel’s Barbie and Marvel in 2019.