Tabletops: Off-road adventure
Premium Partner
In recent weeks, a flood of new Apple Premium Partner stores and Apple Shops opened in cities including Kuala Lumpur, Zurich, Paris, Prague, and Almaty.
These spaces are some of the first in the next generation of reseller stores reimagined with new Apple-designed fixtures. Many of these stores were previously designated as Apple Premium Resellers. Premium Partner locations are built and managed hand-in-hand with Apple and must meet strict customer experience standards.
All of the sales fixtures and finishes in each new reseller store come from some of the same teams working on official Apple Stores. The furniture is designed to be more affordable, easier to install, and crucially for partners, easier to merchandise. The materials still feel premium and well-crafted.
Previews of this new reseller experience began appearing last year at a few Apple Shops — the kiosk-sized stores you've probably seen at Best Buy. Carrier stores have also added individual design elements.
While less visually spectacular than official Apple Stores, these new Premium Partner locations are worth paying attention to. In many places, the store designs match or exceed stainless steel Classic Stores in terms of functionality and product display.
Compared to official Classic Stores, these outlets offer backlit Feature Bays, consistent and bright accessory lighting, custom display fixtures for third-party products like speakers, channel tables at every location with power routed through the leg, and secured display shelving for sellable merchandise on the sales floor, something only the latest AirPods and Apple TV Avenues provide.
None of this should come as a surprise. The Classic Store design is still largely a product of 2006.
Avenue ascendant
Apple Watch Ultra is charting new waters with custom display panels in the band bay at stores with Avenues. This display is a variation of the unique installation at Apple Park Visitor Center. A simplified version without the dimensional cutaway is found at stores with a 5-foot bay.
The new band bay, which we've covered here extensively, represents the Avenue in its purest, most idealized form.
Apple Newsroom, May 2016:
“The Avenue,” inspired by the window displays along a boulevard that dynamically change with the season. Avenue walls are interactive themed “windows” where Apple’s products and services come to life, from music, to creativity, apps, photography and more.
I reference this press release quite often because it's one of the only places Apple has publicly explained its retail design thinking in the past decade. The band bay is beautifully seasonal in its modularity.
A new Apple Watch Ultra riser is also now merchandised at stores without a glass Apple Watch display table. Pictured here is Apple Rosenthaler Straße, shot by Filip Chudzinski.
Featured image
Apple Champs-Élysées
Photo via @edngetstheshot on Instagram.