Ron Johnson, who ran operations at Apple, explains how the company built the Fifth Avenue glass cube store and created One-to-One, a personal training program that cost $99 a year. Both started as ways to make customers feel welcomed and connected to the brand.
Chapters
A few years after the Genius Bar, you know, we said, well, what else can we do to enrich someone's life? We said people buy a Mac or a product because they want to do something like create a website or, you know, do something with digital photography or make a movie, but no one knew how. So we decided, what if we could teach people how in the Apple Store? And we created this program called One-to-One. First year it didn't work. Nobody knew, no one came. And then we started to charge for it. We said, let's make it— let's— maybe if we add a price to it, it'll have more value. And it did. We charged $99, not for one training session, for a year. And then you had access to the personal training services of the Apple Store. Well, today there are more people per store that learn the digital arts at the Apple Store than attend Stanford as freshmen. The average store has over 2,000 families that belong, that come in all week long to learn the digital arts. At one point, 14% of Palo Alto belonged to the store on University Avenue. That's one out of every 7 houses would go to the Apple Store to learn how to use Apple products. Think of how profound that is when you have these avid users using your product, right? But again, it was an imagined idea that had no short-term revenue impact, that was solely designed to deepen the relationship, enrich the customer's life. And within a couple years, we were teaching more people per store in 3,000 square feet than Stanford does in 8,000 acres. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. A few years later at the Apple Store, another imagination story. You gotta build a store on Fifth Avenue. What do you do? They're expensive. Nobody makes money on Fifth Avenue in New York, right? How do we stand out? How do you fit in and stand out? Well, we looked and looked and looked and couldn't find anything. And there was one unleased property for 7 years that had been owned by Donald Trump. One of these great real estate people never could lease the space. Well, that's 'cause the space was underground. There had never been a retail store in the world that succeeded underground. But we didn't just say no, we said, well, how would you create a great place underground? We said, well, let's— how do you get light into every square foot of the space? That's with glass. Well, how do you create an entry that's basically a doorway that's made of glass that sheds light everywhere? And how do you give back that space that could be a store to the public in the form of a plaza? And we created that cube on Fifth Avenue. That was another thing imagined that became one of the great stores in the world. It's the 5th highest tourist site in Manhattan, just after the Statue of Liberty and a few others. Why? Great real estate. We used our imagination. We built something that nobody thought could.
