The Man Who Designed the Apple Store on Apple and the Future of Retail

Thirteen years ago, Tim Kobe designed the Apple Store, which became a central part of Apple's brand identity. Now traditional retail faces new challenges, and Kobe thinks Apple needs to answer them too.

Tim Kobe wears a black crew-neck T-shirt wherever he goes. He has done so since he was an unknown, hard-up designer. Only once did he swap it for a pink shirt: to meet executives from Coach, who had complained that he always dressed in black.

In 2001, he and the design studio he founded, 8 Inc., built the Apple Store for Steve Jobs, and it overturned the retail experience. He still remembers the night before the first store opened, when they worked late into the night to get everything in place. Jobs sat on a long table and said to them, "Guys, what if nobody shows up tomorrow?" "No way," he remembers everyone answering.

After that, Gap, Nike, Coach, Citibank, Virgin Atlantic and, most recently, Tesla all became clients of 8 Inc. Yet Kobe has done no more than add a well-made dark jacket over the black T-shirt. He pulls two silver Rimowa suitcases, one large and one small, around the world, sharing his ideas with clients.

On November 20, 2014, wearing the same black T-shirt, he talked to QDaily about what he has learned from designing for retail.

Tim Kobe presents his design philosophy and case studies at Q Salon

"I believe emotion always outweighs function and form. That's why Apple Stores are always packed with crazy fans. Good retail design should inspire irrational brand loyalty." Kobe put a formula up on the projector screen: E > F/F (Emotion > Form / Function).

"If all you set out to create is a 'store,' a 'store' is all it will ever be. The Apple Store succeeds because it doesn't just sell goods. It is a space that offers an experience, and the most recognizable expression of the brand," Kobe said.

"In 2001, just before the first store we designed for Apple opened, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a story in which almost everyone doubted it. One analyst said, 'Two years from now Apple will wake up and realize what a painful and costly mistake this was.' Then in 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek ran another story saying that 'sales per square foot (about 0.09 square meters) are equivalent to a Mercedes, and the Apple Store is probably the highest-performing retail outlet in the history of retail,'" Kobe said. "To innovate you have to take some risks. Without risk there is never a breakthrough."

The Apple Store at Zorlu Center, Istanbul

As a piece of store design, the Apple Store broke every convention of traditional retail from the day it opened. Large expanses of glass replaced the usual shopfront, making the store look open and friendly. Display windows gave way to open long tables covered with products that people were invited to try as much as they liked. Even basements, which traditional retail ignored, could become stores: all it took was a glowing Apple logo in a glass enclosure standing at street level. The Genius Bar replaced the old repair counter, turning the Apple Store into a space that combines service, product and experience.

Thirteen years on, Apple has opened 444 retail stores in 16 countries, yet the store design has hardly changed. Thirteen years have not been enough to make it look dated. Every weekend the stores are still crowded. Every time a new product launches, Apple fans and scalpers line up outside. "I have to admit that the Apple Store has kept its appeal for more than a decade largely because Apple keeps releasing new products that draw people in to try them and buy them," Kobe said.

He remembers that when he drew up the retail design for Apple in 2001, Apple had only four products, two desktops and two laptops, yet Jobs wanted a retail space of 6,000 square feet (about 557 square meters). So Kobe came up with a design that did not center on the products but drew customers in as much as possible. Today, with the iPhone, the iPad and the upcoming Apple Watch, an Apple Store stocks far more than it did then.

"On the other hand, although many competitors have tried to copy the Apple Store's style, none has surpassed the benchmark Apple set. That is also why Apple has felt no hurry to update its store design over the past decade or so. In that sense, you could say Apple has been lucky," Kobe said.

Kobe may say this because traditional retail really has changed enormously over the past decade, yet no one seems to have responded perfectly. The change comes less from the rise of e-commerce than from shifts in how consumers shop.

"I hate the term O2O. No one divides their life into online and offline. For consumers, online and offline are one thing. In the future, what retailers sell in physical stores should not be 'products' but 'time,' and even if customers don't end up buying, they should be rewarded for the time they spent," Guo Lu, a digital experience consultant at IDEO, told QDaily. She was previously Asia director of digital and omni-channel at VF Corporation, the second-largest apparel retailer in the United States, whose brands include The North Face and Timberland.

Thomas Stemper, an architect and the founder of Chuangrui Architectural Design Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., believes that the retail spaces of the future, especially large shopping malls, will become adaptive smart buildings. Using sensors and real-time control systems, the space will be able to truly "interact" with everyone inside it.

"If you're disappointed with shopping malls today, don't worry, because they certainly won't stay the way they are. The 'shopping' center of the future will become an 'experience center' or a 'lifestyle center.'" Chuangrui has built quite a few Wanda Plazas, though Stemper believes Wanda is not a model for retail design: it pursues efficiency so hard that designers have little room to work.

Thomas Stemper (far left), Guo Lu (second from left) and Tim Kobe at the QDaily salon

Besides opening more physical stores, Apple is also building its online business and trying to join the two. For example, you can book online and then get one-on-one help at the Genius Bar with whatever problem you have. Kobe sees this as the most basic principle. "Today physical stores and digital must be combined. If they aren't, you fall behind. But physical stores won't disappear, because humans are, after all, social animals. On this point I rather agree with the idea of omni-channel: physical stores will become the social support for e-commerce."

Over the past decade he produced four versions of the Apple Store design. In the latest, the stores' white walls were replaced with new metal ones, echoing the growing use of metal in Apple's products. From a distance the walls look like ordinary metal, but up close they reflect like a mirror, an effect that requires a special polishing technique. He calls this a "Steve Jobs-style detail": it makes the design hard for competitors to copy and gives customers small surprises.

But even this latest version is two or three years old. In fact, since Jobs died in 2011, Kobe has gradually come to feel that "Apple is no longer the Apple it used to be." He talks about these changes with a note of sadness for what has been lost. He last saw Jobs about six to eight months before Jobs died. "I just hoped he could eat a big steak in one go," Kobe said.

After Tim Cook became Apple's CEO, he announced his first major appointment in January 2012: John Browett, CEO of Dixons, Europe's largest electronics retailer, would run Apple's retail stores worldwide. After that, everything changed. Apple seemed to deliberately cut back the role of outside designers like Kobe and tighten internal control.

John Browett

In April 2012, John Browett formally joined Apple. Someone suggested that Kobe call the new head of retail to talk things over. He did, and Browett made it clear that he disagreed with how Apple Stores had been designed and run, and that he would bring in an entirely new approach. Kobe hung up, deeply embarrassed. Six months later, Apple announced that Browett was leaving, without giving a reason.

Then, in May 2014, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joined Apple as senior vice president in charge of retail. Kobe says he has had no contact of any kind with her to this day. They have not met and have not exchanged a single word. Nor does he know anything about how the Apple Watch is coming along.

Ironically, Apple poached two core designers from his team who had worked closely on the Apple Store. "I know Steve would never have done something like that. If he trusted your ability, he would use you, not poach your team," Kobe said.

8 Inc. still designs the venues for Apple's launch events. Yes, that includes this year's box wrapped entirely in white cloth (Kobe says he did that simply because the building was "too ugly"). It also designed the delicate stands that hold the iPhone 6/6 Plus and the Apple Watch upright.

But he is in fact disappointed in both of these new Apple products. "The Apple Watch looks like the kind of watch a 'technology' company would make," Kobe told QDaily.

Nor will he buy an iPhone 6 Plus. "The iPhone 6/6 Plus is a purely market-driven product, not a design-driven one. In a smartphone, any 'form' is worth having only if it improves the user experience. Otherwise it is just a gimmick to attract investors. The iPhone 6's big screen came at the expense of people who use their phone with one hand, and the blind pursuit of thinness has spoiled its back with antenna bands and a protruding camera. Also, I don't want to have to charge my phone within a single day. In my view, it was a design failure from the start," Kobe said.

He believes that after the departure of Scott Forstall (senior vice president in charge of iOS, and a veteran who had been at Apple since 1997), Apple began to focus too much on "form" and neglect software. The problem with the executives from the fashion world, Angela Ahrendts and Paul Deneve, the YSL CEO hired later, is that they don't understand software and care only about form; the $4,000 gold-plated Apple Watch is the best proof. Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive ought to be the person who can turn things around, but there seems to be very little he can do.

In 2013, in an interview with the design website Dezeen.com, Kobe said bluntly: "Apple's momentum is disappearing since Steve Jobs's death. Apple badly needs a shift. It should renew its retail concept at least every five years, rather than keep opening stores that look much the same."

"Whenever I criticize Apple, people often ask, 'Why are you so harsh on Apple?' What they don't know is that Apple's harshest critic was Steve Jobs himself," Kobe told QDaily.

Since last year, Kobe has gradually moved his base from San Francisco, near Apple's headquarters, to Singapore, which means the firm that was once Apple's largest outside design partner is now focusing on Asia. He has set up a studio in Beijing and is designing showrooms in China for Lincoln. This trip to Shanghai was to meet executives at China Merchants Bank, one of 8 Inc.'s new clients. He is also in close contact with Alibaba, looking for chances to work together.

"I would never say the Apple Store is an unbeatable model for retail design," Kobe said. Whether the next design to overturn the retail experience will again come from 8 Inc., now that its focus has moved to Asia, no one can yet say.

Cover image: www.trendec.net