Amazon Style

» see amazon.com/style as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There were two of them, ever. One at the Americana at Brand in Glendale, California, which opened on 25 May 2022, and one at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, which opened that October. Both closed on 9 November 2023, a week after Amazon told reporters it was done with clothing shops.

The idea was worth trying. A clothing store's floor is a compromise between showing you what exists and holding enough sizes of it, so most shops show you a fraction of the catalog in a crush of identical garments. Amazon Style put exactly one of each item on the rack. You browsed a range roughly twice the size of a normal store, scanned the QR code on anything you liked with the Amazon app, and a staff member pulled your size from the back.

What arrived was a fitting room with your name on the door and a touchscreen inside it. You could request other sizes without getting dressed again, and the screen would suggest things based on what you had already carried in. It was the recommendation engine from the website, rebuilt out of a stockroom and a person with a scanner. When it worked, the reviews said it felt like a very expensive personal shopper who happened to be free.

None of this reached Turkey and it was never going to. Amazon Style existed in two American shopping malls for a year and a half, which means the total population that could physically use it was whoever lived near Glendale or Columbus and owned an iPhone with the Amazon app on it. I read the coverage at the time the way you read about a restaurant on another continent.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rest of the estate ~

Amazon has been closing its own stores for years now and Style is one of a series. The 4-star shops went in 2022. Amazon Books, the chain that put physical bookshops back into malls with cover-out shelving and review cards, closed the same year. Amazon Go shrank quietly, and the checkout technology that justified the whole exercise got sold to other retailers as a product rather than run as a chain.

The surviving physical business is food. Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, the grocery partnerships. That was the explicit framing in the November 2023 statement: closing Style to focus on online fashion, while continuing to invest in growing the grocery stores. Groceries are the one category where people still want to stand in a room and pick the item up.

~ why a clothes shop is hard ~

The tell is in the timing. Glendale opened in May 2022, Columbus in October, and then nothing. A retail format that is working opens its third store in year two. Amazon announced Style in January 2022 as a new kind of experience and then never expanded past the pair, which is a company running the numbers and not liking them.

The economics are unkind. One of each item on the floor means your stockroom does all the work and your staff spend the day fetching, and the labor you saved at checkout you spent again on runners. Apparel also has the worst return rate in retail, which is the exact problem Amazon was hoping a fitting room would fix, except a fitting room is expensive and a mailing label is not.

~ what closed on 9 november ~

Both stores went dark the same day, staff were offered roles elsewhere in the company, and the Glendale unit at the Americana went back on the market. The Yelp page for it is still up, marked CLOSED in capitals, with 52 reviews and 148 photos of a shop that operated for slightly less than eighteen months.

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