Amazon is opening its first brick-and-mortar store devoted to clothing.
The company today held a grand opening for the so-called "Amazon Style" store, which is located in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles.
The retail shop offers men’s and women’s clothing from hundreds of brands, including Calvin Klein, Levi’s, and Lacoste. But unlike other outlets, it has a strong focus on leveraging the customer’s smartphone during the shopping process.
Clothing items in the store will have a QR code posted next to them. Interested buyers can then scan the code while using the Amazon Shopping app, and a store employee will bring the item in the desired size and color to their fitting room to try on.
To pull this off, Amazon has an inventory area, where store employees are working to assemble the clothing choices together. “When our customers are generating tasks for us to pick, we are putting this stuff together before they get into their fitting room,” Armando Tecson Jr. said in a video Amazon posted about the store.
This allows the store to prioritize "more looks and less clutter to in-store shopping," the company said. In the fitting room, customers can request additional clothing items through a touch screen nearby. They can also skip trying on the clothes and request that employees prepare the items for checkout, where payment can be completed through an Amazon account or via credit card.
The Style store can also recommend clothing items to you through the Amazon Shopping app. "Our advanced machine learning algorithms continually refine to find looks just for you based on your preferences,” the company said on its website for Amazon Style.
The store promises to stock the most popular clothing styles from Amazon.com, along with exclusive items that will be made on the Style store first. If you're not a fan of the QR code approach, you can ask a store employee for help, according to Women's Wear Daily.