Beyond Price Tags: What I Learned from New York’s Elite Stores

Something I enjoyed from my time in New York during NRF week is visiting a lot of premium and luxury stores. And one thing that was common, the standard that these stores have set, is that experience or experiential brand elements, that's the norm. That's the standard. It's no longer just about providing good customer service; it's about how do you make the person feel when they're in the store and how do you continuously make them feel every time they come back or make them feel so good that they always want to come back.

It's about how they feel when they're wearing your clothes or using your products. It's always about how the customer feels. It's not just about selling things for a lower price or a better price. It's not talking about the tech and the features that the products may have, even if they are different and revolutionary. It's not just about that because other brands can do that, and other brands are most likely already doing that.

So differentiate; the differentiator is how each brand makes people feel when they enter their store, and that was what I enjoyed the most—seeing how each brand did it differently. Although many of the brands and stores that I went to had cafes or restaurants or some sort of food-related counter and were selling a food-related item, whether it was coffee, it's how you felt when you entered the store that was different and the service you received and how the cafe was incorporated into the store or integrated within this store experience.

So it's not just about opening a cafe within a store for the sake of it. It's about embedding the lifestyle that comes with a coffee drinker or whatever drink or food item that you're selling. It's the lifestyle, it's the products, and it's how those blend with the brand experience that you want to deliver to the customers entering the store.