Home Here’s Why Apple Really Should Build Standalone Apple Watch Stores

Here’s Why Apple Really Should Build Standalone Apple Watch Stores

Move over, Rolex. According to reports by the French media late last week, Apple may be taking a page from your playbook by building dedicated stores for its upcoming Apple Watch.

The company has not breathed a word of this, of course, but there’s reason to believe it may be true. But those reasons may be more than skin deep. The popular narrative chalks this up to Apple copying jewelry or luxury goods makers, and it’s tempting to say Apple just wants to give its “precious” an equally precious retail environment.

See also: The Apple Watch Could Get Its Own Dedicated Store

But there are more pragmatic reasons than that—some of which may offer lessons to other would-be smartwatch makers.

How Precious Can You Get?

From Apple’s Apple Watch Edition line, which features sapphire glass and 18 karat gold.

If the new device was a phone, it would sit out in the open at Apple Stores. The other jewels in Apple’s crown, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, are displayed just this way, tethered by thin cables and caked in the thick smudges that only thousands of shoppers could leave behind. They line up like good little soldiers alongside the latest iPads, iPod touches and MacBook Airs.

The company may not want the Apple Watch to suffer that indignity. After all, it has hifalutin ambitions for the product.

Apple Watches will also be available for aluminum and stainless steel versions.

Apple’s profound power of denial has it refusing to call the wrist gadget—which will link to iPhones and work with apps—something as mundane as a smartwatch. Last September, the company went out of its way to invite fashion journalists and other tastemakers to its press announcement. Vogue China editors saw the watch in person before many American tech reporters did, putting the gadget on its cover. Now Self bookends the fashion push as the first U.S. magazine to do the same.

How glamorous. So if Apple is designing whole stores around the smartwatch—and it is a smartwatch, no matter what Apple says—it seems rather fitting. The company would give its wrist device some space to breath and glass display cases to highlight the beauty. All the better to add to the product’s allure.

See also: Apple Bets Big On Its Smartwatch, Though Killer Apps May Be Missing In Action

But Apple may have another motivation for constructing special brick-and-mortar stores: theft protection. Apple Stores from California to North Carolina to many other parts of the U.S. and abroad, including Paris, have seen robberies, smash-and-grabs and even thefts enabled by barreling a car into an Apple storefront. Former NBA basketball player Rex Chapman alone made off with $14,000, and Apple’s own employees apparently can’t resist joining in on the illicit activity.

Apple downplays the issue, and it doesn’t disclose figures attached to theft, but the sums are likely considerable. (The company has hundreds of stores worldwide, with more than 250 in the U.S. alone.) A few Apple Store employees in the Bay Area have told me their locations see frequent thefts. Some are brazen snatching incidents, others skew toward subtle cons like Rex Chapman’s—with perpetrators waltzing out the door after faking an Easy Pay self-checkout transaction.

The addition of even smaller devices—worth between $350 to as much as $5,000—would surely heighten the temptation.

Apple Watch prices may top out at $5,000, but it’s still nothing compared to this diamond-crusted variation by Mervis Diamond Importers, which will cost $30,000.

Not that Apple Watches will be entirely MIA from current stores. More likely, the base models will sit out in those display tables, while premium versions will probably get stashed in backroom vaults. But that’s hardly a great way to showcase 18 karat-gold premium devices.

A jewelry store-style setting, presumably equipped with cameras, alarms and tightened security, would allow the company to feature all models of its Apple Watch in a grander—and more guarded—setting.

Why Every Smartwatch Maker Should Root For Apple

LG Urbane smartwatch

New purpose-built retail locations would allow Apple to give the public hands-on time without magnifying the shoplifting temptation in its regular stores. That hands-on time is crucial.

The last time Apple debuted a category-defining device was the iPad’s roll-out in 2010. Ahead of that launch, naysayers just couldn’t see the point of what some called “a vastly oversized iPod touch.” But the extra space allowed developers to rethink their user interfaces and create more immersive experiences that just weren’t possible on smaller displays.

In other words, you had to actually use it to really get it. The same may well be true of the Apple Watch.

Samsung Gear S is basically the tablet or “phablet” of smartwatches.

The iPad ultimately won many of the critics over, with some even publicly admitting their error. Its soaring sales prompted many of major smartphone makers to also become tablet makers. Though sales of its big-screen mobile device have dropped lately, the launch experience was valuable for Apple—particularly now as it prepares to unleash its smallest-screen gadget.

Apple likely noticed some interesting customer behavior in its existing stores: Some people need to hold the devices in their hands before they can fall in love with them. That may be even truer for unproven gadgets.

That’s one reason why, even though brick-and-mortar locations seem so very antiquated in these digital times, they’ve become surprisingly de rigueur among tech companies as varied as Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Samsung. Apple has mastered its grip on physical retail better than most, and now it may be poised to do it once again, all for a single product.

A lot could be riding on it. While the public seems intrigued by smartwatches, many still haven’t yet hopped on the bandwagon. Perhaps, like with iPads, they need to experience them first.

That can be tougher than it seems. When the Asus ZenWatch was supposed to launch at Best Buy last November, I headed to my local outpost to check it out on day one. The employees had no idea what I was talking about, and couldn’t even find the device in their inventory database.

If Apple is building Watch Stores, it may be in part because the company wants to give its first real wearable its biggest chance of success. If it works, the tech giant might find itself popularizing a nascent product category once again and raising the profile of a whole industry.

Success should be easy to gauge. We’ll just have to look out for jewelry store-like retail spaces with customers lined up all the way down the block.

Device photos courtesy of their respective manufacturers

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