How He Made Apple the #1 Store in New York City!

this dave meltzer with entrepreneurs the playbook and I have a legend sorry when we say let me feel old but this CEO Tim Kobe of both 8 Inc and x8 ventures known specifically for what I think is the legend of design of workflow design architectural design just an entire business design that is world-renowned your stores specifically Apple and Coke and the companies keep going when you work with Steve Jobs literally every week for 12 years yeah I mean this is a genius-level person some of this accessing information is speed and which most people don't vibrate what were a few things that you took away that not that he told you that you took the way by observing Steve Jobs that were great lessons for you yeah I mean we we probably when we were hired we were probably hired from the benefit of having worked with another another fairly significant individual guy named Robert Mondavi he used to make wines in California sure you know and what we learned was when when when Bob would interview somebody he would bring in a marketing team and hear three pitches or four pitches but he would always stop people in the middle of their pitch and say you know this doesn't really work for me what else do you have and and the first time he did it we thought okay this is this was you know this company is kind of missing the point but in fact he did it to everyone and he did it into everyone to see how they think on their feet and to see how they respond to criticism it was much mark sort of a character's assessment yeah and when we were hired by Steve we started working on his on the Mac world events we started launching the products with him and I wrote a white paper on why they should do retail and gave it to them and his assistant called one day and said you know Steve would like to see a capabilities presentation of your of your retail work and he's in the car he'll be there in 30 minutes and so so you know he shows up and he looks at the work and we've done work for Nike and we've done work for The North Face and he looks at it and and the first thing he said was what would you say if I told you I don't like this work and my business partner of course he was just like oh my god he doesn't like it and God just comes out yeah and and you know he he said none of this looks like Apple uses you know you know why should why should I hire you and and I said because no this looks like Apple I said this this looks likes what's right for Nike this is what's right for the North Face and what we've been doing for Apple for the last years it's gonna be you know has been right for you guys and so he sort of paused for a while and and got up and thanked us and went out the door you know and at that time you said you know I I don't know if you've done enough retail yet and so shook hands and went out and we said so what does yet mean does that mean we're hired or not so next day he called and we started on a white board that's sketchy when you have a design adjusting is so important in fact I think the strategy of asking someone you know what would you do with this or stop I don't like because you don't know fully until there's people flowing through a store mm-hmm do you have a plan for adjustment so as you make the design develop the design is there room for adjustment within in Apple Store when you first started so you know with with with any project you you want to prototype things and so typically you'll prototype you know offline it won't be out in public yet with Apple you know prototyping in warehouses and things getting buy-in from different people getting insights from different people ultimately you don't really know until you open the first store and the night night before we open the first store first Apple stores he was sitting on one of the tables and then we had just set everything everything was you know beautiful ready to open and he looked at us he said guys what if nobody comes tomorrow you know we were sort of shocked but at that time he would be asking us that question but but you know I mean the reality was he was definitely concerned you know Bloomberg and other other you know well-known business pundits were saying this could be a big mistake and he didn't want to really suffer through another impact on his his career at that time but you know of course the next morning we had 4,000 people waiting in line or something and it was it was great but you know there was there's always a bit of that anxiety when you first opened because you just don't know how people are gonna react the interesting thing was we started the design of the second generation of the stores after the first year and that was as much taking the learnings that we had from how people were interacting we had incredible sales for example in the in the first flagship in New York you know one retail store in the world by the way yeah yeah well they'll be me not I remember yeah the first time I was one of the first people in that store you know I was thinking and I didn't know you at the time I said oh my gosh this is extraordinary like who could think of this no yes I mean oh really it's a team a team of people working on every project but but when you you know when you get to the point of understanding what what the initial reaction is to people and we don't we found we didn't have enough throughput that we had more customers and we had retail touchpoints and so you know we we evolved that store I think two or three times in terms of the in terms of the evolution of the interactions there and ultimately went to the mobile the mobile you know payment processing because you know we have too many people waiting in line there's just too much volume [Music]

Channel: David Meltzer

Views: 84,375

Keywords: apple, apple event, apple event 2024, apple store, tim kobe, apple leaks, david meltzer

Id: v2zyW8j7pvo

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019