What's the Store of Tomorrow?

It was a pop-up on a pop-up – you know how that goes. You’re surfing, it looks interesting, you click on it, something else appears alongside, that looks interesting too, you bite – and suddenly you’re scanning a slideshow of “25 worst Kardashian moments.”

This one, though, was truly intriguing to me: “Facebook Explains Why It Wants to Be a Retail Store.”

I tried to imagine what a Facebook store might look like, crammed into the mall between Foot Locker and Coldwater Creek. What would it sell?

Clearly, I’ve spent too much of the last 20 years writing about bricks-and-mortar retailing. The article made me face the 21^st Century reality everyone else lives in. It’s about Facebook wanting to test a “buy” option inside its News Feed posts and ads. (Does Mark Zuckerberg even know what a coldwater creek is?)

In other words, another big Internet player wants to leverage its incredible online traffic to sell things.

It seems that, at least in certain conversations, people aren’t distinguishing anymore between “e-tailing” and “bricks-and-mortar.” “Retail” and “store” mean “digital,” unless otherwise expressed.

Which is fine. Shifting along with shifting tastes, habits, technology is a part of business. Retailers have too often been accused of not shifting adroitly enough. So figuring out how to master digital retailing makes perfect sense.

But we all live in a world in which the traditional, physical store is everything. Architects and space planners are the experts of solid, dimensional walls, floors and ceilings, lighting and HVAC, to say nothing about configuring the space to accommodate the modern digital world.

Where is your pathway, though, against the digital retail efforts of Apple, Google and now Facebook? It was one thing to deal with Apple’s bright new stores. That was a world you knew. It offered challenge but also inspiration. Where exactly do store designers find their niche in this brave new world?

One of the things I learned early on, and a message I never missed a chance to preach, was that this world of retail design includes the great overlooked creative class of professionals. Fashion designers, interior designers, architectural designers, industrial designers, even movie and stage set designers, all got the bright lights shined on them.

But how about the people who built the fun into Disney stores, the elegance into Saks stores, the quirkiness into Urban Outfitters stores, the branding into Bloomingdale’s stores, the efficiency into Target stores, the adaptability into Best Buy stores, the genius into Apple stores?

It seems like the time to exercise that great creativity is now. Keep store design in the hands of the store designers, before it becomes simply another IT exercise.

As a journalist, writer, editor and commentator, Steve Kaufman has been watching the store design industry for 20 years. He has seen the business cycle through retailtainment, minimalism, category killers, big boxes, pop-ups, custom stores, global roll-outs, international sourcing, interactive kiosks, the emergence of China, the various definitions of “branding” and Amazon.com. He has reported on the rise of brand concept shops, the demise of brand concept shops and the resurgence of brand concept shops. He has been an eyewitness to the reality that nothing stays the same, except the retailer-shopper relationship.