A few days ago we learned that Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores, Angela Ahrendts, would participate in the conference The Year Ahead, organized by Bloomberg. But yesterday she was also at another event at Fast Company, called “Innovation Festival”.
The executive discussed Apple's concern for providing its customers with a good experience in addition to simply selling products in stores, even including a special focus on "non-sellable" services such as Apple Pay and Apple Music. Ahrendts claimed to be working with Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine to promote the streaming of music from Ma in their stores in some special way. Not to mention the challenges of selling entirely new products, such as the Apple Watch.
The former CEO of Burberry also remains dedicated to bringing Apple's physical and online stores closer together, evolving them beyond what are already famous today, for example, the praised experience provided by Genius Bar. Ma intends to continue remodeling the stores, always thinking about the way in which Apple devices are used, whether in photography, games or even in app programming.
Apple's preoccupation with China is so great today that Ahrendts revealed a plan by the company to have Chinese employees in practically all its stores around the world, in order to better serve Mandarin-speaking tourists. Currently, the Upper East Side store in New York has 21 employees trained to serve Chinese.
Despite not being in the media spotlight, Ahrendts has constant communication with Apple's retail employees and shares weekly videos with an average of three minutes each. In the first six months after joining the company, the executive personally visited stores in more than 40 different markets.
According to Ahrendts, currently Apple's online stores receive 3 billion visitors a year, while physical stores (almost 500 stores in total) exceed 390 million.
