History
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, returned as interim CEO in 1997. According to Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs began a concerted campaign to help sales by improving the retail presentation of Macintosh computers. Even with new products launched under Job's watch like the iMac and the PowerBook G3 and an online store, Apple still relied heavily on big box computer and electronics stores for most of their sales. There, customers continued to deal with poorly trained and ill-maintained Mac sections that did not foster customer loyalty to Apple and did not help differentiate the Mac user-experience from Windows.
Jobs' first priority was ending almost every big box retailer's ties to Apple, except for CompUSA which retained its Apple contract by agreeing to adopt Apple's "store within a store" concept. This required that approximately 15% of each CompUSA store would be set aside for Mac hardware and software (including non-Apple products) and would play host to a part-time Apple salesperson. However the "store within a store" approach was not successful in part because the Apple section was in the lowest-traffic area of CompUSA stores. Jobs and his executives saw that they didn't have enough control over the presentation of Apple products so they decided on creating an Apple retail store.
In 1999, Jobs personally recruited Millard Drexler to serve on Apple's board of directors, Drexler was the CEO of Gap Inc. whose explosive growth had been attributed to retailing environments and marketing rather than its products or competitive prices. Drexler was one of the few directors who supported Jobs' retail stores initiative, the others on the board were skeptical as this would compete with third-party retailers, and also as Gateway, Inc. had struggled with its own stores. In 2000, Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target, where he had been vice president of merchandising responsible for launching the Michael Graves line of consumer products that raised Target's image beyond that of just an upscale K-Mart. At Drexler's suggestion, Johnson then built a mock-up of an Apple store inside a warehouse near the company's headquarters in Cupertino.
On May 15, 2001, Jobs hosted a press event at Apple's first store at the Tysons Corner Center mall in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Jobs led a group of journalists from a hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, to Apple's first store in the second level of Tysons Corner Center for a commemorative press event. The first two Apple Stores opened on May 19 in Tysons Corner and the same day in Glendale, California at Glendale Galleria. The first Apple Store with the current layout and hardware (wood tables and stone flooring) opened in Pasadena, California.
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