The retail industry has a hard case of Apple envy. For good reason. The maker of fashionable gadgets [is celebrating] 10 years since the launch of its first Apple Stores, marking a record run of sales and a new world order in retailing.
“They grew faster than any other retailer in history” in the first three years, says Robin Lewis, co-author of The New Rules of Retail, who points to their numbers.
Take last quarter’s results. Apple Stores’ sales shot up $ 1.5 billion, or 90%, to $ 3.2 billion in its fiscal second quarter compared with the same period a year earlier. It didn’t hurt that the maker of must-have iPhones, iPods and Mac computers cranked out another hot seller, the iPad. Apple sold nearly 4.7 million iPads in the quarter, and industry tracker iSuppli expects it to sell almost 44 million for the year. The attraction helped bring in 33% more store visitors during the quarter vs. a year ago. What other retailer has a following that will camp overnight in front of stores to be the first on the block with an iPad?
The Apple Stores’ debut defied logic at the time. Conventional wisdom was that computer retailing was a cut-throat and risky business. That was made clear when Gateway, now owned by Acer of Taiwan, rolled the dice to expand from online sales to its ill-fated Gateway Country Stores, only to shutter its remaining 188 stores in 2004.
Despite the odds, Apple is now the case study for the retail industry of today.
“They basically took the old book of retail and threw it out and started over,” says Apple analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray. “The irony of the whole Apple retail story is that nobody believed it could work. Nobody believed a computer maker would make a good computer retailer.”
Industry watchers…
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