Amazon's new attempt at physical retail is selling clothes offline

After disrupting brick-and-mortar retail, Amazon will open a clothing store in the physical world.

Amazon announced Thursday that its first clothing store, called Amazon Style, in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, will open later this year.

The store will sell men's and women's clothing, footwear and accessories from well-known and emerging brands at prices that cater to a variety of different shoppers.

Amazon has experimented with brick-and-mortar retail models in the book and grocery space:

In 2015, Amazon opened a bookstore and began to venture into brick-and-mortar retail, before moving into brick-and-mortar retail in 2017 with a $13.7 billion acquisition of upscale grocer Whole Foods.

Since then, it has launched many other models, including "buy-and-go" convenience stores, offline retail stores selling the best-selling items online, and even its own supermarket chain.

But it's never sold clothing or shoes at those stores, and the upcoming clothing store marks Amazon's latest experiment in brick-and-mortar retail.

For years, Amazon has been expanding its share of clothing sales. In the early days, Amazon achieved initial success online by selling basic clothing from various popular brands and private labels. In recent years, it has ventured into the high-end market by opening luxury fashion stores online.

Like Amazon's other brick-and-mortar retail concepts, Amazon Style will fully embody the concept of combining online and offline shopping experiences and create more tech shopping experiences for shoppers.

This includes shoppers can scan the QR code on their products to see other sizes, colors, product ratings, and personalized recommendations after logging into the Amazon app, or adding items online to the fitting room, and the bigger highlight is that shoppers can continue shopping without leaving the fitting room.

Amazon says it wants to address some of the pain points that exist in traditional retail stores, such as fitting rooms. Amazon has added touchscreen displays to fitting rooms that shoppers can use to rate items or request that items of different styles or sizes be delivered to the fitting room.

This article is from Wall Street Insights, welcome to download the APP to see more