Customers prefer stores to websites,
and digital brands take notice
Last year, store openings outnumbered closings by nearly five-to-one, according to the research report service The Daily on Retail. And many of those new stores were launched by brands that were previously digital only – a trend that’s expected to continue, according to Inc. magazine.
“There’s obviously a lot of noise and chaos in the broader macroeconomic environment right now, but irrespective of that, people do want to experience brands in-person,” Amish Tolia, co-CEO and co-founder of Leap (New York) told Inc. Leap is a retail platform that has helped launch brick-and-mortar locations for such direct-to-consumers businesses as sleepwear line Lunya, clothing brand Frank and Oak and activewear brand Set Active. “There’s not going to be a slowdown in demand for retailers to continue investing in their brick-and-mortar channels, or even launching their brick-and-mortar channel for the first time.”
The article also points to a poll from last May, which comes from customer engagement platform Emarsys. That report found more than half of U.S. consumers prefer stores to websites.
A similar scenario has been observed playing out by other news outlets, as well, which points to this movement as an actual growing trend, and not just one point of data from one source.