Nathan Stringer
BiteMyApple, a holiday pop-up in lower Manhattan, has white walls adorned with green apples and sells sleek gadgets to adorn your Apple products. The various mounts, docks, stands, speakers and chargers available were all conceived and fully funded on Kickstarter, only now making their in-store debut. (You can see the entire collection on BiteMyApple’s site.)
Everything in the store is fresh, and the inventiveness of the products is exciting. It felt as though “As Seen On Kickstarter ” has replaced “As Seen On TV”; the products are minimalistic, manifestly useful and priced well above $19.95. While the pop-up’s counters and walls show scuff marks and aren’t enchanting like the cube of glass found at Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store, charm is not the point; nor is it the kind of space meant to contest the Big A. Rather than a sprawling Internet of Things, this is a physical room for things on the internet.
The runaway bestseller at BiteMyApple is the Bolt: in its first week, the store sold out of this product. Bolt is a battery backup for smartphones that, unlike other backups on the market, doesn’t require a USB to charge. Bolt can replace a phone’s wall charger, and while you’re charging your phone through it, the battery backup is charging as well. Until manufacturers significantly improve battery life - which we predict won’t happen for another 10 years - crowdsourced products like Bolt will have to plug the gap.
Brick-and-mortar outlets and pop-ups like BiteMyApple are merging into a continuum with online platforms to present omnichannel buying experiences to consumers. (As explored in our trend Versat-aisle Shopper.) BiteMyApple is selling products the world has literally never seen before, previously only available to touch and hold once received in the mail and unboxed. Half of Americans say they visit stores to look at products they want to buy before then making a final purchase online; 65% of showroomers do so to be able to touch, feel or try the product,* so it’s reasonable to suspect that BiteMyApple is helping to kickstart the sales of these products, and it’s an example of a retail trend that we expect to continue.
*Source: nVision Research | Base: 2002 online respondents aged 16+, USA, 2015 September
Source: nVision Research | Base: 1001 online respondents (all who visit store before buying online) aged 16+, USA, 2015 September
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