The Future of Retail Is Offline
Around the beginning of May, designer Emily Dawn Long opened her New York City studio for appointments. The idea, she says, was for people to experience her clothes IRL — to touch them, try them on, chat with her about them. “My pieces are thoughtful and made with purpose. So that's why I’m welcoming people into my brain,” she says.
“I really want to get away from online,” she adds. “Lately I feel like people are missing the point.”
Instead of anonymously scrolling through her web store, Long’s buyers are now right in front of her. “What I love most is meeting and chatting with customers,” she says. “I love to learn more about what fits, what works for them, their body shape, what they are missing. I think we both learn from each other.”
Long isn’t alone in her desire for in-person interaction. More and more, our collective digital exhaustion is leading to a craving for something different from the shopping experience — something that feels more real. It’s a reminder, after years of anonymous browsing with our faces two inches from a screen, that shopping should be a holistic, good experience. That the effort you exert when you buy something — and the way you feel when you buy it — is just as important as the item itself.
To feed that impulse, a growing number of designers and retailers are choosing to deemphasize their online presence and in some cases to go offline altogether. Instead, they’re investing time and money in physical shopping, offering something deeper: an experience, a connection, and a window into the way they work.
Outline, a Brooklyn womenswear store, replaced its web store with a catalog in April this year. For founders Hannah Rieke and Margaret Austin, the inspiration came from their memories of growing up in the ‘90s, waiting for catalogs from their favorite brands (“Pottery Barn Teen and even, we’ll admit, Abercrombie & Fitch”) to land on the doormat. “There’s a different kind of romance with a printed catalog,” Rieke says: “seeing something, thinking about it, dreaming about it, and ultimately finding your way to the store to try pieces on.”
“Shopping in-store allows you to touch and feel and imagine what the item might add to your actual life,” Rieke adds, “not the life you’re imagining for yourself while you’re scrolling on the internet.”
Then there’s Ven.Space, the much-lauded menswear store that opened in Brooklyn last year. Ven.Space has no e-commerce or web shop; its site simply lists its address and the brands it carries. “The idea was to create a self-sustainable business that didn’t have too much pressure on it,” says founder Christopher Green. “With brick-and-mortar, you’re in the shop every day. You’re able to control the environment and the experience the customer has when they come into the store.”
Green, like Long, is big on communication. “It’s getting to know who the customer is,” he says, “chatting with them and finding out who they are, what they’re looking for, getting an idea of what the end use of the product is going to be, why they’re consuming that product, finding out the best way to fill their wardrobe and find things that they’re actually going to wear.”
The trend has carried across the pond to Awaykin, opened in late May, where founder Paul-Anthony Smith has also decided against e-commerce. He launched the company 10 years ago as a brand development and growth studio. Expanding into retail felt like “a natural move to create a space where the brands we support could be experienced in a more meaningful way,” he says.
While Awaykin is a store first and foremost, Smith also sees it as a sort of community space — a place for activations for designers and friends. The interior, designed by Max Radford, is modular and can be moved and adapted for different purposes. He describes the impetus behind this as “an overall weariness of a digital world, and a yearning for physical connection to people, to the clothing we buy, to the objects we curate in our homes, to the food we eat.”
For all the brands and designers opting for physical retail, the benefits can be felt in a few ways. Blackbird Spyplane founder Jonah Weiner, who covered the emergence of new offline retail spaces last year, says that for designers and owners, there are important business considerations. “A lot of small, independent retailers don’t feel they can play the e-comm game anymore. That the field is stacked against them in favor of the big places who can do insane early discounting and make back the money through sheer volume of sales,” he says. “And running a site can be like running a second store, in terms of time and cost. So people at some of the smaller shops I've talked to feel they’re better off investing their money and energy into improving the actual experience of people who walk through the doors.”
Then there’s the practical consideration for shoppers, who get to experience the garments firsthand. “Everything you see online risks having this deadened, disenchanted flatness to it,” Weiner says. “Clothes that pop on a phone screen are different from clothes you fall in love with when you see them, touch them, and try them on. If you’re older than about 13, and you aren’t just wearing clothes to get likes from strangers on fit pics, the clothes that hit in person are probably the ones you want to be wearing.”
Physically crossing the threshold of a store means that you’re entering a carefully chosen world. “We’re not trying to overwhelm you visually,” says Green of Ven.Space. “There’s a key scent in the store, and we have a curated playlist that’s playing all the time. Everything in there is for you to come in and wash yourself clean of everything going on outside.”
It might seem counterintuitive for retailers to turn their backs on the easy access and convenient clicks of e-commerce. But in an oversaturated market, sometimes it’s more important to offer something different: an experience, a community, a feeling, of which the clothes are just one part. Some of the most interesting stores and designers in the world are doing it, and it likely won’t be long until bigger names follow.
“Everyone who leaves my studio says, ‘Thank you, that was so nice, I really needed that, I love everything you’re making,’” Long says. “That in itself is a win for me.”
