Why The Physical Shopping Experience Isn’t Going Anywhere

Stores no longer stand alone as the only gateway to a brand. They are part of a triumvirate. Physical shops, online experiences, and luxury-level services via text, voice and video all bring consumers and products closer. This is forcing us to rethink the definition of a luxury customer experience. Our future customers will move freely between online, chat, voice, video and physical stores without thinking about the distinction, and the physical store will showcase human touches and experiences impossible to achieve online. In the 1990s, when I was pushing a digital future for music, I was dismissed as either crazy or an enemy of an entrenched industry that sincerely believed they would sell Compact Discs forever. But I was a believer, and for twenty years I pushed the rock uphill at Winamp, AOL, Yahoo! Music, Beats Music and Apple. By the time we launched Apple Music in 2014 the fix was in. The industry had crested the proverbial hill and the recorded music business was set to grow again as tens of millions of music subscribers were added. With digital music on its way to growth I went looking for another industry in transition. I left Apple and moved from California to Paris to help with the digital transformation at LVMH, the group that has defined and will continue to define luxury. Read more at CNN Style.