Stores aren’t for selling, they are for delighting your customers

In the future brick-and-mortar stores will be fun and exciting places to visit, and most ordinary commerce will be done online, according to George Blankenship, VP of worldwide sales at Tesla Motors.

Blankenship, who also designed Apple’s retail stores, explained that products that don’t require customer education and engagement will move online, and the remaining stores will look more like the Apple or Tesla experience. However, creating this experience isn’t easy. In a video played before his talk, Blankenship explained that at Apple they built four different versions of the store before they hit the right formula. And even getting to that point wasn’t easy because the world — namely in the form of landlords — wasn’t ready to buy into the Apple vision.