Amazon.com Inc. is opening its first physical clothing store, Amazon Style, on Wednesday, the latest brick-and-mortar initiative from the world’s largest online retailer.
Called Amazon Style, the shop is located in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles. The Seattle-based company has pledged to open stores only when it has something original to offer customers. In Style’s case, the new wrinkle is an app that lets shoppers scan codes on displayed items, which employees fetch in the right size or color and then send to a fitting room or checkout counter.
Amazon has built a giant ecommerce business selling basic clothing items like packs of T-shirts. But it has had less success courting fashion brands, which have long balked at counterfeits on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. The new store will sell brands including Lacoste, Levi’s and Steve Madden, according to the outlet’s website.
The opening comes two months after Amazon said it was closing dozens of physical bookstores, “Amazon 4-Star” stores and mall pop-up kiosks so the company could focus on its chain of Fresh supermarkets and such initiatives as Style.
Amazon ranks No. 1 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s database that sorts top online retailers in order by web sales.
However, as Amazon Style provides customers a physical store to shop in, Walmart is advancing its drone plans. Walmart drone deliveries for $3.99 could be coming to six states by year-end. The expanded network has the potential to reach 4 million U.S. households and give Walmart the capacity to deliver 1 million packages by air in a year.
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