Levi’s Opens Digitally-Rich NextGen Stores In US, China

October 13, 2020 by Dave Haynes

Levi Strauss & Co. has started opening what it is calling its NextGen stores – new shops built around personalization and digital.

The San Francisco-based apparel company put one of the first stores of this new format in the epicenter of digital – Silicon Valley – and in a mall where price is probably not much of a consideration: the Stanford Shopping Center in dotcom-rich Palo Alto, California.

The NextGen stores have an LED-driven entry, stacked LCD video walls at the rear for branding, and a curious blend of an old-school analog signboard with an iPad that probably won’t last (spend a few extra bucks and AT LEAST put this in an Armodilo enclosure!).

The store will also offer curbside pickup, personal shopping appointments, and buy-online-pickup-in-stores capabilities. 

The denim brand says it plans to open about 100 new small-format stores over the next several years, some of them these NextGen formats. There are already NextGen stores in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, AZ, and the first NextGen store opened in Shanghai in September.

I like the LED entry and suspect this sort of thing will be increasingly common as new LED manufacturing processes do a good job of protecting the LED lights from bumps, scratches and spills. It can be a wall finish, if protected. 

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