Apps make shopping a special event

When Orlando Reindorf opened the third location of his fashion boutique, The Standard Store, in Barangaroo, Sydney, he was initially thrilled to be part of the eco-friendly, mixed-use development. Being surrounded by office buildings typically means a lot of midweek foot traffic, but Reindorf soon realised something was off.

“The majority of people who use Barangaroo, Monday to Friday, are not interested in our retail experience down there. Other retail experiences are working very well, but a more design-focused business like ours didn’t work,” Reindorf tells IRW.

Having a few slow weeks is never easy in retail, but it’s especially challenging for smaller, independent businesses. Reindorf says he made changes quickly to try to get the business back on track.

“I realised very early on in the piece that menswear wasn’t selling in Barangaroo, [so] I pulled the menswear out and it became primarily a womenswear store,” he says.

But this change didn’t help, and in the end, Reindorf made the difficult decision to close the store. He says he learned a valuable lesson about the interplay between a store’s location and its offering.

“If you are too directional, you alienate a lot of your customers who just want to come in and have a small, boutique experience and buy a nice, navy jumper because it’s cold… That’s your bread-and-butter customer,” he says.

“But, if every jumper you have in your store is navy blue, then you’re going to lose your more directional customer, and you’re not going to be the cool, kudos store.

“It’s about getting that balance right.”

But in an environment where Kogan is doubling its earnings on a yearly basis, Amazon is raising quarterly income by 1,186 per cent and national retail chains are rolling out three-hour delivery to compete in challenging market, retailers like Reindorf don’t have the luxury of time to get that balance right.

However, new technologies are hitting the market that aim to make it easier for the Reindorfs of the world to reach their customers.

One of these new technologies is Brauz, an app that lets users track items they want to buy and notifies them when they’re within a predetermined distance of a store that has the items in stock. The app also suggests similar items nearby and facilitates in-store purchase in the app, or three-hour delivery.

Brauz co-founder Lee Hardham says he came up with the idea after realising just how hard it is for most retailers to get discovered through Google search results.

If there are only 24 listings on a given item, say, and more than half of those results are pure-play online retailers, “there isn’t much room for physical retailers to be found”, he tells IRW.

“How do we make our stores more discoverable? It dawned on me that [we would need to] find the products people want before they started searching.”

Hardham raised $2.2 million and invested in machine learning and data science to build Brauz, which is starting to gain traction.

The City of Adelaide last week announced a yearlong pilot project that will allow 49 businesses, including Dangerfield, Gorman, Tony Bianco, Morrison, Seafolly and Zimmerman, to build a hyper-local presence on the app.

Hardham says his research shows customers typically want three things from a retailer.

“They want to find items, they want to try these items before they buy them, and they just want to enjoy them,” he says, noting that this actually gives physical retailers an advantage.

New apps like Brauz have been built specifically to do what social media apps like Instagram ended up doing organically: connect smaller retailers with a limited physical presence to the masses.

Australian handbag and accessories brand The Daily Edited (TDE) took off on social media, and the retailer still primarily interacts with customers through the channel.

“[Customers] like to direct message brands, and comment on things, and they like to be engaged in the process,” TDE CEO and co-founder Alyce Tran tells IRW.

TDE is now increasingly using social media to drive customers into its bricks-and-mortar stores by making those stores something customers want to share online.

“When I open stores I never want to do something where there are just some shelves on the wall and a point-of-sale system,” Tran says.

“I want to create stores that are interesting to look at, Instagrammable, so that they become destinations that people want to go see, to take a photo and add to their Instagram gallery.”

TDE’s flagship store in Westfield Sydney, for example, is set out like a one-bedroom luxury apartment, with a bed, bath, study and lounge area, which doubles as the point of sale.

“People love it when they go in there,” Tran says. “They’re like, ‘What is this? I’ve never seen this before’, and then they start taking photos of it.”

Tran says retailers need to understand that shopping is inherently “inconvenient” for most customers.

“You’ve got to park your car, pay money for parking, or you’re getting on public transport, so when you get there is has to be good. Otherwise, why? You could just buy the product online,” she says.

IBISWorld Senior Industry Analyst Kim Do agrees that independent retailers must provide a unique and superior shopping experience and pay close attention to store design and customer service in order to compete with larger competitors.

“Other examples [of techniques] include holding workshops, exhibitions, masterclasses and community-focused events. These initiatives ultimately offer experiences that are not available offline,” Do says.

“If smaller retailers are planning to compete with larger competitors on price alone, it will be hard to survive.”

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