E-commerce juggernaut Amazon is shutting the doors, permanently, on its two brick-and-mortar apparel stores.
The Seattle-based company's plans to close Amazon Style shops in Glendale, California, and Columbus, Ohio, mark its latest retreat from a physical-retail foray. And it comes less than two years after Amazon announced it was debuting its first clothing store, the one in the Los Angeles suburbs. Both Amazon Style locations will be shut by next Thursday.
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to close our two Amazon Style physical retail stores and focus on our online fashion shopping experience," Kristen Kish, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in an email to CoStar News on Thursday.
She added that the company is "working closely with our affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon. Physical retail remains an important part of our business, and we’re continuing to invest in growing our grocery stores business, which spans Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market, Amazon Go and third-party partnerships.”
In the past year or so, Amazon has significantly backtracked on its strategy for physical retail. In March 2022 it said it was shuttering 68 stores, namely its Amazon 4-star, Amazon Pop Up and Amazon Books locations. In February, the company announced it was closing some of its Amazon Fresh supermarkets and halting the chain's rollout, as well as closing a number of its Amazon Go convenience stores.
The company now appears to be retrenching. By abandoning its apparel stores, a move first reported by Bloomberg News, Amazon can concentrate on improving several of its troubled existing brick-and-mortar formats. It recently launched two redesigned Amazon Fresh stores in Chicago and plans to refresh existing stores in the greater Los Angeles area later this year.
Amazon has also opened a new Amazon Go suburban location in Puyallup, Washington, and two new Amazon Fresh stores in the United Kingdom. It has also confirmed that more than 50 more of its Whole Foods Market locations are in the pipeline.
High-Tech Retreat
Neil Saunders, a managing director at GlobalData, said in a note to clients Thursday that "as Amazon has only two Style stores, the decision to shut the operation is not all that noteworthy in terms of scale. However, it is symbolically significant in that it represents another retreat from physical non-food retail following last year’s closure of Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star shops."
He added that "this is part and parcel of Amazon’s wider efforts to curtail ventures that it does not see as having long-term potential or which are not generating good returns for the business. Amazon Style falls firmly into this category as it is hard to see how the initiative would scale and become a powerhouse of apparel retail."
Amazon employed high-tech features at its clothing stores, such as having having merchandise in a shopper’s specific size brought from on-site inventory to a dressing room via an app. Artificial intelligence algorithms also pinged other suggested purchases to customers.
Saunders wasn't impressed with those offerings.
"Amazon Style is an interesting enough concept, with well-designed and pleasantly merchandised stores," he said. "However, in our view, the automation of the fitting rooms is an over-engineered solution in search of a problem. Amazon is simply trying to reinvent something for the sake of reinvention and ended up with a business model that was more complex and costly than a regular clothing store. Unlike most apparel shops, Amazon Style also lacks a distinctive point of view. While it sells some good brands and has an interesting range of apparel, it lacks the handwriting or personality of most traditional clothing stores so struggles to build a base of regular, loyal customers in the way that other brands do."
Amazon declined to comment on Saunders’ comments.
Saunders did laud Amazon for its selling of apparel online, an arena where he said "it has considerable success."
Customers can shop the same fashion brands that were available in-store at Amazon Style, and more, at the online Amazon Fashion store. The company is also expanding its online selection, recently adding handbag brand Coach.