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Designing a Store for the Next 150 Years
Designing a Store for the Next 150 Years
The future of retail isn’t about maximizing sales per square foot. It’s about creating places people choose to spend time.
In my last piece, I wrote about why a nearly 150-year-old institution should borrow from the startup playbook to stay relevant. So when the opportunity to open a concept store first came to us, we very much had this startup playbook in mind.
The idea seemed simple enough: build a store within Harvard’s new enterprise research campus in Allston. This is where Harvard is building its future, and we started thinking about the idea of the future of Harvard and the future of The COOP, side by side. The more we sat with it, the more obvious the question became: Instead of building a store that felt like other COOP stores, how can we build a store that reflects where we’re headed?
With this in mind, here are a few insights into how we approached building this store, why the store looks and feels the way it does, and what we’re doing to measure success.
Designing Like a Startup
When we began, we went looking for inspiration from other retailers reinventing the in-store experience. We felt there were a handful of stores worth watching, but there was no obvious template.
In a way, not trying to replicate another store was liberating. Instead of starting with a solution, we started with a problem: If we were founding The COOP today, with no stores and no history to lean on, what would it be and what role should it play in the lives of both our members and the broader community of visitors to The COOP?
Thinking through these questions led us to design a concept store from the bottom up, the way you'd build a new company. Throughout the store building process, a few principles shaped every decision we made.
- Lead with experience, not transaction. For generations, retail has been measured by sales per square foot. It's a useful number, but if you start there, it leads you down the path of building a store that's efficient and forgettable. Especially at a time when you can buy everything online, if the only reason to walk through our door is to make a purchase, we've already lost. So we designed the space around experience and community. Instead of optimizing for products per square foot, we optimized for creating a space where people want to spend time. Everything in the store is movable, which allows us to be a store by day and a space for a musical performance or community gathering by night.
- Design for discovery. When I talk to people who were COOP members decades ago, they remind me that The COOP used to have a certain mystique. You could spend the whole afternoon wandering The COOP, not quite sure what you'd find around the next corner. We wanted to bring that feeling of surprise back, in a more modern and intentional way. We want the store to look and feel different each time you enter, with unexpected activations to showcase new ideas.
- Curate for our community. Our community comes from everywhere. Our members (Harvard and MIT students and alumni) come from all over the world, and we also serve visitors from around the world. In thinking about curating products for the global customer, a generic assortment of Boston, Harvard, and MIT products felt wrong. Instead, we brought in products from around the world to reflect the global mindset of the people who walk in.
- Design for adaptability. Too many stores are designed to be finished. We wanted ours to be unfinished by design. The best startups are constantly iterating. We expect to revisit everything based upon what we learn from our customers.
A Living Lab
The reason we call it a concept store rather than just a new store is that the store itself is very much a prototype. The space is designed for experimentation. We plan on continuously testing different products, ways of merchandising, and programming.
We think of the concept store as a living lab that will impact everything we do. If something resonates here, like a brand founded by a Harvard or MIT student or something we've discovered halfway around the world, we can roll it out across our other stores. The concept store lets us be nimble in a way a large flagship simply can't.
We’re not only testing products. We’re testing ideas. Which conversations bring people together and create community? Which partnerships or activations strengthen our connection to Harvard and MIT? How can we begin to add value to our communities not just through what we sell them but how we make them feel?
Startups build, measure, learn and improve. We want this store to embody that same philosophy.
Modern, but Unmistakably The COOP
For all the talk of starting from scratch, the store is very much rooted in the history, legacy and heritage of The COOP’s past.
The COOP of the past was a true department store serving Harvard, MIT and the broader community. You could buy cosmetics, get your suits tailored, and shop for everything from records to books and toys. This concept store is very much a nod to offering a wide range of goods that are carefully curated to best serve our members and the broader community.
For instance, the Ivy aesthetic is having a moment right now, and plenty of brands are reaching for it. At The COOP, we don't have to reach because we genuinely are one of the first retailers that truly served the Ivy community. Throughout the store, you’ll see how we’ve tastefully introduced new emblematic apparel, while also bringing back non-emblematic apparel. To give another example, The COOP was the area's largest record store at one time, and always a bookstore. When you come into the concept store, you’ll see how vinyl and books are essential to the space.
When we did a soft opening of the concept store during Harvard commencement week, I so enjoyed watching as people walked in, looked around, then stepped back outside to check the sign. They commented on both the selection of products and the authentic, archival objects from Harvard used throughout the store’s design, including imagery and merchandise we pulled from The COOP’s own history.
Many of the visitors I spoke with were both surprised and delighted. Later in the week, when we had Harvard reunions, there were people who visited this new store who lit up because it reminded them of the spirit of The COOP they knew from decades ago. While it’s still early days, I’m proud to see the concept store resonate both with those who were familiar with The COOP and those experiencing it for the first time.
Heritage shouldn’t be a constraint, it should be a competitive advantage. We weren’t interested in recreating the past. We wanted to reinterpret it for a new generation.
Measuring Success
When designing a store as a place for discovery and engagement, sales can’t be the only metric that matters.
Some of the metrics we’re most excited about won’t appear in traditional retail. In Allston, we’re paying attention to a range of signals that show how much visitors enjoy their experience. We’re capturing data that helps us answer these types of questions: How long do people stay? How often do they come back? How do they interact with the space, the products, and each other? We also want to ensure that we’re segmenting this data by COOP members, to ensure that we’re serving our core audience as effectively as possible.
Speaking of COOP members, this concept store gives us a place to showcase the products and ideas coming from Harvard and MIT students and alumni. We will continuously look for opportunities to spotlight our members’ ventures, and measure the success they see as a result of their partnerships with The COOP.
What’s Next
We often say we’re designing a store for the next 150 years. What we really mean is that we’re designing an institution that’s willing to keep changing. If we do this well, the concept store won't be remembered because it looked different. It’ll be remembered because it changed how The COOP serves its community. While retail will always be a part of who we are, it’s becoming the way people enter the experience — not the experience itself.
At The COOP, our leadership team is having a bigger conversation about what membership in a cooperative should mean, and why it should be far more than a discount at the register. For my next post, I’ll share more about how we’re redefining membership at The COOP.
In the meantime, if you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll visit our new concept store soon and let us know what you think.