Steve Jobs

products, such as a teakettle designed by Michael Graves. “Steve is very easy to talk to,” said Johnson in recalling their first meeting. “All of a sudden there’s a torn pair of jeans and turtleneck, and he’s off and running about why he needed great stores. If Apple is going to succeed, he told me, we’re going to win on innovation. And you can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate to customers.”
    When Johnson came back in January 2000 to be interviewed again, Jobs suggested that they take a walk. They went to the sprawling 140-store Stanford Shopping Mall at 8:30 a.m. The stores weren’t open yet, so they walked up and down the entire mall repeatedly and discussed how it was organized, what role the big department stores played relative to the other stores, and why certain specialty shops were successful.
    They were still walking and talking when the stores opened at 10, and they went into Eddie Bauer. It had an entrance off the mall and another off the parking lot. Jobs decided that Apple stores should have only one entrance, which would make it easier to control the experience. And the Eddie Bauer store, they agreed, was too long and narrow. It was important that customers intuitively grasp the layout of a store as soon as they entered.
    There were no tech stores in the mall, and Johnson explained why: The conventional wisdom was that a consumer, when making a major and infrequent purchase such as a computer, would be willing to drive to a less convenient location, where the rent would be cheaper. Jobs disagreed. Apple stores should be in malls and on Main Streets—in areas with a lot of foot traffic, no matter how expensive. “We may notbe able to get them to drive ten miles to check out our products, but we can get them to walk ten feet,” he said. The Windows users, in particular, had to be ambushed: “If they’re passing by, they will drop in out of curiosity, if we make it inviting enough, and once we get a chance to show them what we have, we will win.”
    Johnson said that the size of a store signaled the importance of the brand. “Is Apple as big of a brand as the Gap?” he asked. Jobs said it was much bigger. Johnson replied that its stores should therefore be bigger. “Otherwise you won’t be relevant.” Jobs described Mike Markkula’s maxim that a good company must “impute”—it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company’s stores. “The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand,” he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. “Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph’s ideals,” Johnson said. “Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn’t think of a Gap product without thinking of the great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and white walls and folded merchandise.”
    When they finished, they drove to Apple and sat in a conference room playing with the company’s products. There weren’t many, not enough to fill the shelves of a conventional store, but that was an advantage. The type of store they would build, they decided, would benefit from having few products. It would be minimalist and airy and offer a lot of places for people to try out things. “Most people don’t know Apple products,” Johnson said. “They think of Apple as a cult. You want to move from a cult to something cool, and having an awesome store where people can try things will help that.” The stores would impute the ethos of Apple products: playful, easy, creative, and on the bright side of the line between hip and intimidating.
    The Prototype
    When Jobs finally presented the idea, the board was not thrilled. Gateway Computers was going down in flames after opening suburban stores, and Jobs’s argument that his would do better because they would be in more expensive locations was not, on its face, reassuring. “Think different” and “Here’s to the crazy ones” made for good advertising slogans, but the board was hesitant to make them guidelines for corporate strategy. “I’m scratching my head and thinking this is crazy,” recalled Art Levinson, the CEO of Genentech who joined the Apple board in 2000. “We are a small