Experience Store

When is a store not a store? When it's an 'Experience Store'. Microsoft's announcement that it will start opening its own retail stores begs the question - are these going to be commercial retail stores which trade to make a buck, or are they going to be more like the Retail Experience Centre in Redmond? Perhaps it will be like the occasion when Nokia opened its first Experience Centre in Moscow, and one journalist described it as more like a "mini-science museum that a high street mobile phone store".

Maybe Microsoft will try to emulate Hewlett Packard? HP has opened three Concept or Experience Stores in EMEA. It opened its first in Johannesburg, South Africa in April 2008. This was designed by US-based agency, Polychrome, as was a concept store in Harrods, the upscale department store in London. The latest HP Experience store opened in Lagos, Nigeria in December 2008. It's not at all clear whether these are just high profile presentation suites or demonstration centres, or whether they mostly serve as experiments in retail design which may be used subsequently in HP's program of store-in-store sites. HP's Store-in Store openings have been announced all across EMEA - in Dubai, in The Netherlands, in Norway, in Portugal, in Saudi Arabia, in Sweden, in Turkey, and several other countries.