Steve Jobs - Visionary

STEVE JOBS - VISIONARY

APPLE STORES

From the book "Steve Jobs"

Genius Bars and Sierra Sandstone


The Customer Experience


Jobs hated to cede control of anything, especially when it might
affect the customer experience. But he faced a problem. There was
one part of the process he didn't control: the experience of
buying an Apple product in a store.
The days of the Byte Shop were over. Industry sales were shifting
from local computer specialty shops to megachains and big box
stores, where most clerks had neither the knowledge nor the
incentive to explain the distinctive nature of Apple products.
"All that the salesman cared about was a $50 spiff," Jobs said.
Other computers were pretty generic, but Apple's had innovative
features and a higher price tag. He didn't want an iMac to sit on
a shelf between a Dell and a Compaq while an uninformed clerk
recited the specs of each. "Unless we could find ways to get our
message to customers at the store, we were screwed."
In great secrecy, Jobs began in late 1999 to interview executives
who might be able to develop a string of Apple retail stores. One
of the candidates had a passion for design and the boyish
enthusiasm of a natural-born retailer: Ron Johnson, the vice
president for merchandising at Target, who was responsible for
launching distinctive-looking products, such as a teakettle
designed by Michael Graves. "Steve is very easy to talk to," said
Johnson in recalling their first meeting. "All of a sudden
there's a torn pair of jeans and turtleneck, and he's off and
running about why he needed great stores. If Apple is going to
succeed, he told me, we're going to win on innovation. And you
can't win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate to
customers."
When Johnson came back in January 2000 to be interviewed again,
Jobs suggested that they take a walk. They went to the sprawling
140-store Stanford Shopping Mall at 8:30 a.m. The stores weren't
open yet, so they walked up and down the entire mall repeatedly
and discussed how it was organized, what role the big department
stores played relative to the other stores, and why certain
specialty shops were successful.
They were still walking and talking when the stores opened at 10,
and they went into Eddie Bauer. It had an entrance off the mall
and another off the parking lot. Jobs decided that Apple stores
should have only one entrance, which would make it easier to
control the experience. And the Eddie Bauer store, they agreed,
was too long and narrow. It was important that customers
intuitively grasp the layout of a store as soon as they entered.
There were no tech stores in the mall, and Johnson explained why:
The conventional wisdom was that a consumer, when making a major
and infrequent purchase such as a computer, would be willing to
drive to a less convenient location, where the rent would be
cheaper. Jobs disagreed. Apple stores should be in malls and on
Main Streets-in areas with a lot of foot traffic, no matter how
expensive. "We may not be able to get them to drive ten miles to
check out our products, but we can get them to walk ten feet," he
said. The Windows users, in particular, had to be ambushed: "If
they're passing by, they will drop in out of curiosity, if we
make it inviting enough, and once we get a chance to show them
what we have, we will win."
Johnson said that the size of a store signaled the importance of
the brand. "Is Apple as big of a brand as the Gap?" he asked.
Jobs said it was much bigger. Johnson replied that its stores
should therefore be bigger. "Otherwise you won't be relevant."
Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must
"impute" - it must convey its values and importance in everything
it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It
definitely applied to a company's stores. "The store will become
the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he
predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the
wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had
created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. "Whenever I
buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical
expression of Ralph's ideals," Johnson said. "Mickey Drexler did
that with the Gap. You couldn't think of a Gap product without
thinking of the great Gap store with the clean space and wood
floors and white walls and folded merchandise."
When they finished, they drove to Apple and sat in a conference
room playing with the company's products. There weren't many, not
enough to fill the shelves of a conventional store, but that was
an ad vantage. The type of store they would build, they decided,
would benefit from having few products. It would be minimalist
and airy and offer a lot of places for people to try out things.
"Most people don't know Apple products," Johnson said. "They
think of Apple as a cult. You want to move from a cult to
something cool, and having an awesome store where people can try
things will help that." The stores would impute the ethos of
Apple products: playful, easy, creative, and on the bright side
of the line between hip and intimidating.

The Prototype

When Jobs finally presented the idea, the board was not thrilled.
Gateway Computers was going down in flames after opening suburban
stores, and Jobs's argument that his would do better because they
would be in more expensive locations was not, on its face,
reassuring. "Think different" and "Here's to the crazy ones" made
for good advertising slogans, but the board was hesitant to make
them guidelines for corporate strategy. "I'm scratching my head
and thinking this is crazy," recalled Art Levinson, the CEO of
Genentech who joined the Apple board in 2000. "We are a small
company, a marginal player. I said that I'm not sure I can
support something like this." Ed Woolard was also dubious.
"Gateway has tried this and failed, while Dell is selling direct
to consumers without stores and succeeding," he argued. Jobs was
not appreciative of too much pushback from the board. The last
time that happened, he had replaced most of the members. This
time, for personal reasons as well as being tired of playing
tug-of-war with Jobs, Woolard decided to step down. But before he
did, the board approved a trial run of four Apple stores.
Jobs did have one supporter on the board. In 1999 he had
recruited the Bronx-born retailing prince Millard "Mickey"
Drexler, who as CEO of Gap had transformed a sleepy chain into an
icon of American casual culture. He was one of the few people in
the world who were as successful and savvy as Jobs on matters of
design, image, and consumer yearnings. In addition, he had
insisted on end-to-end control: Gap stores sold only Gap
products, and Gap products were sold almost exclusively in Gap
stores. "I left the department store business because I couldn't
stand not controlling my own product, from how it's manufactured
to how it's sold," Drexler said. "Steve is just that way, which
is why I think he recruited me."
Drexler gave Jobs a piece of advice: Secretly build a prototype
of the store near the Apple campus, furnish it completely, and
then hang out .here until you feel comfortable with it. So
Johnson and Jobs rented a vacant warehouse in Cupertino. Every
Tuesday for six months, they convened an all-morning
brainstorming session there, refining their retailing philosophy
as they walked the space. It was the store equivalent of Ive's
design studio, a haven where Jobs, with his visual approach,
could come up with innovations by touching and seeing the options
as they evolved. "I loved to wander over there on my own, just
checking it out," Jobs recalled.
Sometimes he made Drexler, Larry Ellison, and other trusted
friends come look. "On too many weekends, when he wasn't making
me watch new scenes from Toy Story, he made me go to the
warehouse and look at the mockups for the store," Ellison said.
"He was obsessed by every detail of the aesthetic and the service
experience. It got to the point where I said, `Steve I'm not
coming to see you if you're going to make me go to the store
again."'
Ellison's company, Oracle, was developing software for the
handheld checkout system, which avoided having a cash register
counter. On each visit Jobs prodded Ellison to figure out ways to
streamline the process by eliminating some unnecessary step, such
as handing over the credit card or printing a receipt. "If you
look at the stores and the products, you will see Steve's
obsession with beauty as simplicitythis Bauhaus aesthetic and
wonderful minimalism, which goes all the way to the checkout
process in the stores," said Ellison. "It means the absolute
minimum number of steps. Steve gave us the exact, explicit recipe
for how he wanted the checkout to work."

When Drexler came to see the prototype, he had some criticisms:
"I thought the space was too chopped up and not clean enough.
There were too many distracting architectural features and
colors." He emphasized that a customer should be able to walk
into a retail space and, with one sweep of the eye, understand
the flow. Jobs agreed that simplicity and lack of distractions
were keys to a great store, as they were to a product. "After
that, he nailed it," said Drexler. "The vision he had was
complete control of the entire experience of his product, from
how it was designed and made to how it was sold."

In October 2000, near what he thought was the end of the process,
Johnson woke up in the middle of a night before one of the
Tuesday meetings with a painful thought: They had gotten
something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the store
around each of Apple's main product lines, with areas for the
PowerMac, iMac, iBook, and PowerBook. But Jobs had begun
developing a new concept: the computer as a hub for all your
digital activity. In other words, your computer might handle
video and pictures from your cameras, and perhaps someday your
music player and songs, or your books and magazines. Johnson's
predawn brainstorm was that the stores should organize displays
not just around the company's four lines of computers, but also
around things people might want to do. "For example, I thought
there should be a movie bay where we'd have various Macs and
PowerBooks running Movie and showing how you can import from your
video camera and edit."
Johnson arrived at Jobs's office early that Tuesday and told him
about his sudden insight that they needed to reconfigure the
stores. He had heard tales of his boss's intemperate tongue, but
he had not yet felt its lash-until now. Jobs erupted. "Do you
know what a big change this is?" he yelled. "I've worked my ass
off on this store for six months, and now you want to change
everything!" Jobs suddenly got quiet. "I'm tired. I don't know if
I can design another store from scratch."
Johnson was speechless, and Jobs made sure he remained so. On the
ride to the prototype store, where people had gathered for the
Tuesday meeting, he told Johnson not to say a word, either to him
or to the other members of the team. So the seven-minute drive
proceeded in silence. When they arrived, Jobs had finished
processing the information. "I knew Ron was right," he recalled.
So to Johnson's surprise, Jobs opened the meeting by saying, "Ron
thinks we've got it all wrong. He thinks it should be organized
not around products but instead around what people do." There was
a pause, then Jobs continued. "And you know, he's right." He said
they would redo the layout, even though it would likely delay the
planned January rollout by three or four months. "We've only got
one chance to get it right."
Jobs liked to tell the story-and he did so to his team that
dayabout how everything that he had done correctly had required a
moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to
rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked
about doing it on Toy Story, when the character of Woody had
evolved into being a jerk, and on a couple of occasions with the
original Macintosh. "If something isn't right, you can't just
ignore it and say you'll fix it later," he said. "That's what
other companies do."

When the revised prototype was finally completed in January 2001,
Jobs allowed the board to see it for the first time. He explained
the theories behind the design by sketching on a whiteboard; then
he loaded board members into a van for the two-mile trip. When
they saw what jobs and Johnson had built, they unanimously
approved going ahead. It would, the board agreed, take the
relationship between retailing and brand image to a new level. It
would also ensure that consumers did not see Apple computers as
merely a commodity product like Dell or Compaq.
Most outside experts disagreed. "Maybe it's time Steve Jobs
stopped thinking quite so differently," Business Week wrote in a
story headlined "Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't
Work." Apple's former chief financial officer, Joseph Graziano,
was quoted as saying, "Apple's problem is it still believes the
way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty
content with cheese and crackers." And the retail consultant
David Goldstein declared, "I give them two years before they're
turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake."

Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass

On May 19, 2001, the first Apple store opened in Tyson's Corner,
Virginia, with gleaming white counters, bleached wood floors, and
a huge "Think Different" poster of John and Yoko in bed. The
skeptics were wrong. Gateway stores had been averaging 250
visitors a week. By 2004 Apple stores were averaging 5,400 per
week. That year the stores had $1.2 billion in revenue, setting a
record in the retail industry for reaching the billion-dollar
milestone. Sales in each store were tabulated every four minutes
by Ellison's software, giving instant information on how to
integrate manufacturing, supply, and sales channels.
As the stores flourished, Jobs stayed involved in every aspect.
Lee Clow recalled, "In one of our marketing meetings just as the
stores were opening, Steve made us spend a half hour deciding
what hue of gray the restroom signs should be." The architectural
firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed the signature stores,
but Jobs made all of the major decisions.
Jobs particularly focused on the staircases, which echoed the one
he had built at NeXT. When he visited a store as it was being
constructed, he invariably suggested changes to the staircase.
His name is listed as the lead inventor on two patent
applications on the staircases, one for the see-through look that
features all-glass treads and glass supports melded together with
titanium, the other for the engineering system that uses a
monolithic unit of glass containing multiple glass sheets
laminated together for supporting loads.
In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he
had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of
Florence's sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion
that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look
somewhat pedestriana concern that it's hard to imagine bedeviling
someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Jobs wanted to use that
stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the
color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times
cheaper, but jobs insisted that it had to be authentic. The
gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained
texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, II Casone, in
Firenzuola outside of Florence. "We select only 3% of what comes
out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and
veining and purity," said Johnson. "Steve felt very strongly that
we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with
high integrity." So designers in Florence picked out just the
right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles,
and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that
it was laid out next to its companion tiles. "Knowing that it's
the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you
that it can stand the test of time," said Johnson.
Another notable feature of the stores was the Genius Bar. Johnson
came up with the idea on a two-day retreat with his team. He had
asked them all to describe the best service they'd ever enjoyed.
Almost everyone mentioned some nice experience at a Four Seasons
or RitzCarlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store
managers through the Ritz-Carlton training program and came up
with the idea of replicating something between a concierge desk
and a bar. "What if we staffed the bar with the smartest Mac
people," he said to Jobs. "We could call it the Genius Bar."
Jobs called the idea crazy. He even objected to the name. "You
can't call them geniuses," he said. "They're geeks. They don't
have the people skills to deliver on something called the genius
bar." Johnson thought he had lost, but the next day he ran into
Apple's general counsel, who said, "By the way, Steve just told
me to trademark the name `genius bar."

Many of Jobs's passions came together for Manhattan's Fifth
Avenue store, which opened in 2006: a cube, a signature
staircase, glass, and making a maximum statement through
minimalism. "It was really Steve's store," said Johnson. Open
24/7, it vindicated the strategy of finding signature
high-traffic locations by attracting fifty thousand visitors a
week during its first year. (Remember Gateway's draw: 250
visitors a week.) "This store grosses more per square foot than
any store in the world," Jobs proudly noted in 2010. "It also
grosses more in total-absolute dollars, not just per square
foot-than any store in New York. That includes Saks and
Bloomingdale'$."

Jobs was able to drum up excitement for store openings with the
same flair he used for product releases. People began to travel
to store openings and spend the night outside so they could be
among the first in. "My then 14-year-old son suggested my first
overnighter at Palo Alto, and the experience turned into an
interesting social event," wrote Gary Allen, who started a
website that caters to Apple store fans. "He and I have done
several overnighters, including five in other countries, and have
met so many great people."

In July 2011, a decade after the first ones opened, there were
326 Apple stores. The biggest was in London's Covent Garden, the
tallest in Tokyo's Ginza. The average annual revenue per store
was $34 million, and the total net sales in fiscal 2010 were $9.8
billion. But the stores did even more. They directly accounted
for only 15% of Apple's revenue, but by creating buzz and brand
awareness they indirectly helped boost everything the company
did.
Even as he was fighting the effects of cancer in 2011, Jobs spent
time envisioning future store projects, such as the one he wanted
to build in New York City's Grand Central Terminal. One afternoon
he showed me a picture of the Fifth Avenue store and pointed to
the eighteen pieces of glass on each side. "This was state of the
art in glass technology at the time," he said. "We had to build
our own autoclaves to make the glass." Then he pulled out a
drawing in which the eighteen panes were replaced by four huge
panes. That is what he wanted to do next, he said. Once again, it
was a challenge at the intersection of aesthetics and technology.
"If we wanted to do it with our current technology, we would have
to make the cube a foot shorter," he said. "And I didn't want to
do that. So we have to build some new autoclaves in China."
Ron Johnson was not thrilled by the idea. He thought the eighteen
panes actually looked better than four panes would. "The
proportions we have today work magically with the colonnade of
the GM Building," he said. "It glitters like a jewel box. I think
if we get the glass too transparent, it will almost go away to a
fault." He debated the point with Jobs, but to no avail. "When
technology enables something new, he wants to take advantage of
that," said Johnson. "Plus, for Steve, less is always more,
simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box
with fewer elements, it's better, it's simpler, and it's at the
forefront of technology. That's where Steve likes to be, in both
his products and his stores."
..........

Again we see the amazing mind-set and visionary work of Steve
Jobs. He proved all doubters to be wrong, wrong in a HUGE way,
when Jobs started to open up "Apples Stores" around the country.
In this aspect alone it shows the brilliant business mind of
Steve Jobs.

Keith Hunt