Bose confirmed earlier this week that it will close all its retail stores across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The company will go online only in those markets, and hundreds of staff will be laid off.
Focussing on Customer Needs
The audio-products maker will shutter 119 retail outlets. However, 130 stores will remain open. These will be situated in places such as Greater China and the United Arab Emirates, a Bose spokesperson told The Verge. Colette Burke, Bose’s vice president of global sales also commented:
Originally, our retail stores gave people a way to experience, test, and talk to us about multi-component, CD and DVD-based home entertainment systems. At the time, it was a radical idea, but we focused on what our customers needed, and where they needed it — and we’re doing the same thing now.
Bose Products in Apple Stores
An interesting element to all this is that Apple sells Bose products in its own retail stores. For instance, you can purchase things like the flagship Bose QuietComfort 35 Wireless Headphones both online and in brick-and-mortar Apple Stores.
There are also some Bose products marked “online at Apple.”
The question is what happens next with this relationship? Is Bose gong to rely on Apple to provide its physical retail location across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia? It is probably a fair assumption that Bose products will still be sold in Apple Stores, but it will be worth watching. TMO contacted both companies to get some clarity on this, but neither had responded at the time of this writing.
Looks like all of the Bose product line is available on Amazon.com. A good deal of Bose products are available in store at Best Buy in the United States. So, it not like the Apple store will be the only source for Bose products when the Bose stores close. It’s a good bet that Amazon made the Bose run stores redundant. I can get Bose stuff on sale at Best Buy and Amazon. I’ll pay full price through the Apple though!
However, some of their headphones are shown on the store as “Only at Apple.” So yeah, there’s stuff that will be available elsewhere, but not all of it…
Charlotte:
At our closest shopping mall, there was a Bose Store directly across from the Apple Store, and appeared to be doing a good business; a fair bit of it cross traffic between the two. I recall purchasing my noise cancelling wired ear buds there as my last purchase from the store (had already purchased two sets of head phones – the tropics do not treat them kindly). Sometime during my travels, the store disappeared; perhaps over a year ago according to my wife.
Apple selling Bose products preceded, at least in our area, the Bose brick and mortar stores, and appears to have continued after their introduction. I’m not sure why that would be discontinued, given the popularity of the products. These are also available online directly from Bose, not to mention Amazon and a plethora of other outlets.
Today I learned that Bose has retail stores