Head to Nike’s bustling new Fifth Avenue flagship with a game plan. The six-story, 68,000-square-foot “House of Innovation 000” boasts a head-spinning number of sneaker and clothing styles with unlimited opportunities to customize.
“I love retail that causes shoppers to think ‘Only here’ when they walk in a store,” Nike Direct president Heidi O’Neill said in a statement about the new store. Mission accomplished.
Shrouded in futuristic, opaque patterned glass and built around a wide central staircase, 650 Fifth Ave. welcomes customers with a sleek, high-tech Sneaker Bar where one-of-a-kind shoes can be created with the aid of a “store athlete.” Want to be certain you’re snagging the hottest kicks in the city? The bar can also provide a digital readout of the hottest styles and colors in NYC. Next door, you can watch your customer sneakers come to life at the shop’s open-air atelier.
In fact, nearly every floor of the flagship offers opportunities for adding custom touches to shoes and apparel. Create your own collaboration at the Nike Expert Studio, or head to the Arena, where sneakers are fully customizable with laces, fabrics, decals and more.
OG sneakerheads, however, should beeline up to the fourth floor to peep the Sneaker Lab showroom, which displays the largest concentration of Nike footwear anywhere in the world.
“We believed we could reinvent retail by making it experiential, by elevating the power of our brand and by bringing storytelling to shopping in a way that other retailers hadn’t,” O’Neill said.
That meant going beyond just designing an interactive shopping experience for customers, but also conceptualizing a space that morphs and evolves with trends. In the Arena, for example, tiles can shift and reconfigure to host new spaces, layouts and programs.
On the lower-level Nike Speed Shop, local trending data is used to stock shelves. And throughout the store, NikePlus members can use their app to scan shoes, shop the looks on mannequins, have items sent to a fitting room and even checkout without waiting in line. Swoosh.
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