Future of Retail Festival 2020: How KITH wants to Revive Experiential Retail and Bring the Streets Back to Life
The unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent riots have hit retail extremely hard and further shifted shopping away from brick-and-mortar, compounding challenges that were already facing the industry and forcing many long-standing businesses to close their doors.
In this talk for the Future of Retail Festival 2020, visionary experience design pioneer Lionel Ohayon, founder and CEO of design innovation firm ICRAVE, and Sam Ben-Avraham, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of prolific retailer KITH, discuss what kind of retail and experiences will need to be born to attract people back to the streets and restore our communities.
What viewers will walk away with?
Insights into experience design strategy and its impact on consumer behavior
A playbook of ideas on how to attract consumers back to brick-and-mortar storefronts
Real-world case studies from leading innovators in retail and design
Key reflections
What role will experiential retail play in a post-COVID world?
How can we use technology and design to encourage consumer confidence?
What kinds of retail experiences will be needed to restore our communities?
What do we need to do as an industry to revive brick-and-mortar retail?
Click to watch the full discussion, and read the transcript below.
Lionel Ohayon (00:00):
Hey, everybody. This in Lionel Ohayon from ICRAVE.
sam ben avraham (00:05):
This is Sam Ben-Avraham.
Lionel Ohayon (00:17):
We're glad to be here and talk about this topic. It's obviously a very pressing topic that everyone's got at top of mind. We're thinking about the future of retail. We're thinking about the future of sidewalks and thinking about the future of cities. And I'll tell you what struck me, I was in the city around Soho last week and I was completely struck by the animation of what was happening on the sidewalk. And all of a sudden there were restaurants outside, there was activity, people were turning on music.
I saw a young girl come out of a van and her family behind her, pulling out fold out chairs, they were bringing food out of the van in foiled containers and she started playing on a piece of plywood that was covering up a storefront what painting she was going to do. And there seemed like there was a community organizer working there and the whole family came along and said, "You know what, let's make an event of this and let's see what this afternoon looks like." And all around this kind of easy young energy that was happening on the sidewalk and it really made me as a question.
What is standing in the way of where we are today in the neighborhood like so that's so prolific, that has such a strong brand, that's seen so much transformation that at this moment in time we can look at the sidewalk as maybe a source of the answer to what naturally wants to happen. Sam, you're in Soho a lot, what do you think is going on over there?
sam ben avraham (01:54):
I've been in Soho for 30 years and I came and I loved that place because of the energy that it had 30 years ago. And over the time, we little by little lost it from restriction from the city and landlords being greedy and this was impossible for young talent to activate almost anything. We moved there it was very little retail. There was a few cafes, there was bars, there was a lot of galleries. There was a lot of artists who used to live in those lofts and had their art showing on the streets or upstairs and there was a certain energy to that neighborhood that felt like no where else in New York City. That was kind of like a melting pot for the yuppies that moved from the Upper East Side and want to have something different and the artists and the artists and people, it was just like over the weekend it was just a beautiful mix of people.
And over the years it became like a shopping mall, like any other shopping mall that you go in America. And little by little, the young generation got pushed out of there and they moved into other neighborhood or Brooklyn in the last 10 years it's been pushed to Williamsburg and then from Williamsburg that became a little bit too commercial and then people going into deeper Brooklyn. And the city itself lost its energy, what New York was known for all those years.
Lionel Ohayon (03:35):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the proliferation of development and the intensity and the speed with which New York developed is perfectly, you could draw a graph on how the city gentrified and how artists and creativity and young thinking and opportunity moved further and further away from the city. And I think it's interesting to use Soho as a sort of central node to understand that. That Broadway highway became a mall. And all of a sudden, you know because you've been there during the whole time, all those rents just escalate so high and it not only pushed out anything creative, anything unique, nobody can contend with those kind of rents. So anything, even food, there's no food in the center of it, there's no experience, there's no discovery, there's no sense of trying to find something new and understand what that neighborhood offers that you can't otherwise get, like you said, anywhere in America. Now for the most part, as these national brands moved in, the quality of the experience and the opportunity to not just go ahead and do it online just kind of evaporated. And then this collapse just happened.
I'm interested in how this march into the center and then to Williamsburg and then to other parts of Brooklyn. What's your seeing is the machine that has created gentrification, the values of real estate. A lot of what's happening is really forced by this idea that banks are really underwriting assets. And landlords are trying to find credit tenants. And credit tenants don't mean healthy sidewalks.
sam ben avraham (05:20):
Yeah. And the transition is happening much faster every time. Every neighborhood being developed from zero to 100 in like three years and people being forced to be out of there. With Soho and then when meat packing was developed, it took two years before all the national tenants came in and pushed everybody out. It's really sad to see the city like that and I think hopefully with this pandemic and this whole social justice movement with Black Lives Matter, people are going to realize what really matter and things.
Lionel Ohayon (06:12):
Yeah, I think it's super important to think about these causes and think about what they mean. I get a little bit nervous when it's like a pile on of this moment in time we want to talk about this and not really fundamentally understand how do we actually address a social justice in the city. And what we talked about several times is really this understanding that if a sidewalk works, it works for everybody. And that means that I feel like I have ownership of that neighborhood because I'm included in what that neighborhood offers. The sum of the neighborhood are the parts that allow it sort of exist for me to go to a hardware store or to buy a pair of sneakers or to go to a restaurant that I can afford or any of those parts that speak to the specificity of where you are and the cultural melting pot of all the people who should be involved in it.
And what's happened now is like we've really just pushed neighborhoods into singular tracks. This is high end retail. This is discount retail or whatever it is. And it's never going to perform in the way that we want it to perform as long as it's sort of driven by these economic underpinnings. And the other part of it though, that I think you brought up earlier, is just the community boards and this kind of overlayed governmental institutionalized ideas about what you can and can't do in certain neighborhoods. In Soho, you're not allowed to live in Soho and retail's illegal. And Soho is just retail and people living above retail. So every time you want to do a project there, you've got to unravel this beast. So, I just want to finish on this point on saying, I actually think this is a great, great opportunity right now with what's happening where we have a chance to actually reinvent what retail means. What does it actually mean? How are you going to get people into stores?
sam ben avraham (08:11):
For me, it really takes me back to the days when I arrived in New York. I arrived in New York 31 years ago and it was the land of opportunity because we came with almost no money. We managed to sign a lease based on trust from the landlord. And we build our business block by block. There was a whole bunch of entrepreneurs in one city and everybody were hungry and everybody came down over the weekend and wanted to see and hear what we have to offer. And I really hope, I get the sense, like you said, the other day I went back to the city and I felt like, wow, this doesn't even feel like New York City as I know it, as the modern New York City. Feels like some European city, feels like Tel Aviv, feels like Barcelona, it feels like something that somebody broke all these rigid rules and regulations that been enforced on everyone to follow.
And I feel like the city need to loose up a little bit. The city need to loose up. There's got to be a balance between how, it cannot be just commuting from the suburbs by subway coming in and out and [inaudible 00:09:40]. There's got to be a life in the city for the people who work there and live there.
Lionel Ohayon (09:47):
And I think that's a critical point to understand. It's like, look, this city is an organism. It has its own energy flow. There's a requirement in the city for people who've chosen to live there to take on certain parts of what it means to live in Manhattan. You can't choose to live in downtown Manhattan and then go sit at a community board hearing and argue that you want it to be like living in Westchester. It's not living in Westchester. You've chosen, you've made this decision and the city has to sort of like... You can't put patchwork. You can't just put a bunch of bandaids all over it and try and make it a green dog when it really wants to be a purple elephant. So, the city has its energy and animation that it wants.
sam ben avraham (10:25):
You know what it is, a lot of the community boards, people who been living in the neighborhood for 40-50 years, they got older and the last thing they want is a little bit of noise after 10:00. It's like, you know what, I'm sorry, I know you want to protect your own interest in there, but you a little bit irrelevant to what the neighborhood should be looking like. There should be young generation also part of the community board, have a say because otherwise, this neighborhood getting old and doesn't have anything to offer to the new generation.
Lionel Ohayon (11:02):
Totally. It's interesting, I joined the board some years back of P.S. 122, which is now Performance Space New York. And what happened was when I met the director he said to me, I said, "Why should I join P.S. 122?" And P.S. 122 does really far out there experimental performance art and it's not necessarily my thing. I've partaken in it, but it wouldn't be natural for me to join because of the performance art. What he said to me is he said, "If you don't support artists working in Manhattan, artists won't work in Manhattan anymore. And Manhattan will become..." And, New York he was saying, but Manhattan is like the microcosm of New York. He said, "Manhattan will become a museum city." Like Vienna, like Paris, right? You go to St. Petersburg. These are cities where go and you go, "Oh, back in the 1800s, someone painted here and this is so and so's shop." But now, it's just a museum of a city. It's not real. There's nothing really happening there and that's the big fear that we have with retail in New York.
If retail can't find a home... We look at it on three levels. If you can't create a brand experience, a brand today finds its experiential connection with its customer through Amazon or maybe Instagram or maybe Gilt. So, they don't have control of that conversation anymore. So if they're going to go into retail, they want to control what that experience could actually be. They want something engaging. If you're a customer, you want a reason to shop. It's a convergence of entertainment and shopping. You want a reason to go to the place and not just pick it up online. It's not like a convenience that I can get online. It's like they're actually offering me something I wouldn't otherwise get.
You have to have a brand experience, you have to have a commitment to the customer experience and for the landlords, the landlords need to actually be a partner in this. They can't de-risk themselves and hand all the executional risk on the retailer and say, "Just give me my money." It's just not going to work anymore because the landlords have to be relevant. And so you have to have traffic. You have to create a traffic component. So, it's like relevance to the landlord by traffic, experience for the brands and then a kind of entertainment quality for users.
Those are the same things that you want on the sidewalk and those are how you actually bring a city back to life. And I think that that's the opportunity if retail and real estate environment in New York is broken. You might have rents in retail in New York that are cheaper than commercial rents right now.
sam ben avraham (13:39):
It's very interesting. In Europe, they have this rent control program on commercial properties. So if you rented commercial property, you have the right to renew the lease every 10 years at a percentage that has been dictated by the government.
Lionel Ohayon (14:04):
Yeah.
sam ben avraham (14:05):
You have a 3% escalation-
Lionel Ohayon (14:05):
That totally makes sense.
sam ben avraham (14:06):
... just started a small business, whatever the business is, nobody's forcing you because you've been there, you create a demand for the street and a vibe for the street and now you've been pushed out based on the vibe that you created and somebody else coming in and cash on you and it's usually the landlord. So, they have a program. The person who actually enjoyed the key money is the person who created the vibe, so the store owner. If you decided to leave the store, for whatever reason, he can actually sell the lease for key money and get some money. It's not the landlord. The landlord is getting his return on investment based on this type of calculation. And that's kind of really protecting... And you see when you go to Europe, you see a lot more establishment that been there for many, many years and you can find bookstores and jewelry stores and vintage. So, it's just a lot more fine objects type of store that you can find. In New York City, unfortunately, we're losing it and we're losing the consumer desire to try and be part of it.
Lionel Ohayon (15:37):
[00:15:26 silence]... retail kind of experiences on streets and the second is just like when you think about how stores are, it's so seamless online. There's such a clean and clear informational understanding of what your retail customer is looking for. You can get all the metrics online. You can understand everything that they want. You can understand all of the parts of what they're shopping for. What are they looking at? How much time did they spend on it? What's the demographic? All that information comes to you when it's coming through online. Then you come to a store and it's the dumbest experience. You have no idea who walked in your store, walked out. How long did they... And so we're trying to patch it together with all this kind of technology.
But the truth is that what you want to be able to do is become temporal. You want to shop like you're flipping through your social media feed in a physical world. So what we have to figure out, and I think there are some people who are trying to figure it out, I think we should talk about [inaudible 00:16:38] for a minute. But, I think what you're starting to understand is how do I give online direct to consumer brands an opportunity to be in a zip code so that people can experience the brands, you have that kind of like, I'm going to give you an opportunity to have an experiential connection with your customer.
sam ben avraham (16:58):
So, it's a very tricky experiment to bring physical to online or bring the online to the physical and how does it make sense together. But, I'm a big believer in brick and mortar. We developing stores around the world. We just opened in Tokyo next week. We're going to open up Paris in December. And we are a very big believer in physical stores. We designing each one of our stores differently in relationship to the location with our brand DNA in it. So, it's definitely not just a cookie cutter type of design. Every store in every city would be in relationship to the neighborhood and the city. We using a lot of local resources and designers. Every store has program of local artists that showcasing the product. And every store has distribution of specific product that only available for that specific location.
Back in the days, I used to go to Paris to go to a specific store because I knew I could find stuff that I cannot find anywhere else. So, every store has local identity that is different than the global identity of the brand. So, that's some of the things that we always do in creating demand to come. And people actually looking for, we're releasing products for the Tokyo store and people say, "Wow, it's not fair. Now in the pandemic we cannot even travel." People in America wanted to go to Tokyo to pick up the product that is available for that specific store opening. And that's what I think I'm always missing about travel and Tokyo always give me that because when I go to Tokyo it's one big candy store for me.
Lionel Ohayon (19:25):
Yeah. Completely new world.
sam ben avraham (19:27):
It's a different world. Very Japanese and the food that you eat over there you can only eat over there. The experience that you have with the service, everything is very much the same as it was 50 years ago.
Lionel Ohayon (19:45):
Right. I think it's an interesting conversation just about food and retail and entertainment. These are the components that make up a day of shopping. What do we think about and we're like, "Hey, Sam. Let's go to blah, blah, blah and go shopping." Are you thinking about necessarily the exact product that you're going to pick up? That's kind of the mindset of how we shop online. I need to go get something and you go and you find it and you compare prices and you buy it. When you say let's go spend time shopping with a friend or family members, it's a completely different, it's a different value proposition.
sam ben avraham (20:21):
You hope it's going to be discovery.
Lionel Ohayon (20:23):
It's discovery. You're trying to find something. And so that promise-
sam ben avraham (20:27):
You don't even know is what it is.
Lionel Ohayon (20:29):
Just imagine in 1900 or in 1880, what it was like to walk into a department store. You go into a city. You're in St. Louis or New York or Cleveland or Chicago or Buffalo and you walk-
sam ben avraham (20:47):
Don't go to far. In 1980s, 1990, it was in New York City.
Lionel Ohayon (20:50):
You're right.
sam ben avraham (20:50):
There was still places like that in New York City up until not too long ago. [crosstalk 00:20:57]
Lionel Ohayon (20:57):
That's lost. It's largely lost and I think that that's one of the cues that people need to understand about what retail is. Retail is not buying things. Retail is a holodeck into another world. There's questions about what do leases look like. Landlords can't just get the free pass and be like, "You pay me and go figure your shit out." It just can't work that way. They're now being participatory. If they participate in the risk, it allows retailers to become artists again. I don't have to maximize every square inch to become revenue producing because I can create an experience and in doing so I'm going to attract people into this area and that's going to rejuvenate the neighborhood and build the sidewalk
sam ben avraham (21:38):
Exactly. That's what really happened in the last 20 years in retail. People going safe. What is the best seller for every brand? And then everybody's buying those best sellers and every brand that have a direct to consumer going after those best sellers and everybody have those best sellers and people get sick of them after one season. It's just like everybody looks the same, with the same color pallet, with the same [inaudible 00:22:09]. Everybody look the same.
Lionel Ohayon (22:11):
Which to that point is why shopping online is more interesting than shopping in physical because the products are more interesting. Everyone takes the safe route in physical, but online you find things that you couldn't even imagine finding in a store today. So, people are experimenting the way that they can. And I think that there's a big part of this is really understanding how the economics of retailers will be able to say, "Okay, let's give it a try."
sam ben avraham (22:39):
I've been shopping vintage of the past couple years. I have my 22 years old is shopping vintage because it feels like there's nothing out there that he can put on that going to make him feel like he's different than others. So, it's bring back the uniqueness and the uniqueness has to do with less restriction, rent stabilization. That would bring back the creativity and people are going to be able to take risk again.
Lionel Ohayon (23:15):
So, I have a question here that just popped up. It says, "I'm a design nut and a music nut in equal parts. Would love your take on why music seems like an afterthought in most retail spaces, even the best designed ones." So, it's a good question. There's times when we do what we do at ICRAVE, we program music and we try to understand who we're trying to speak to and what the music should be about and how that's going to create a memory connection to a time in your life where you felt great. So if we're looking for people in their 40s or 50s, we'll play Journey from the '80s because that's going to be your first girlfriend or your first boyfriend or whatever it is and you're kind of making these connections.
The answer in my perspective about music and design is that they want to be more hand in hand, but the trigger for a lot of community boards or for a lot of landlords is that music means something else. If you say music, then you will become something that I don't want you to become. Or music doesn't fit in our proforma because you're going to have to hire bands or you're going to have to have live and that's going to become an ongoing operational cost. And I think it goes back for me, every time we try and propose a new idea and it gets knocked down, it goes back to how are we going to operationalize it? Are we going to have the right to do it? What time can we do it until?
So, I think that people like Sam can speak to this. I think that people want music to be front thing. We want to have a discoverable place where music could just become natural. It should be natural. Music should happen on the street, should happen in stores. There's so much music today. It's like the most incredible time for young artists to have their own voice and to broadcast what they want to say and what they want people to hear without it being done through the top 40 and the top 10 and whatnot. The problem really is, I think, is just where it comes down to where it's been so far is trying to understand how to make the model work because real estate has really driven cost to the point where everyone cuts everything to the absolute bottom line. Does that sound accurate?
sam ben avraham (25:43):
Yeah. But outside of the real estate, I think there's also responsibility on the brands and operators to really dig and find the brand DNA and the core and what are they all about. It's no longer putting a shirt and a pants and a hat on a shelf and hoping that somebody's going to come and buy it. People want to have emotional connection to the brand because otherwise you become a commodity. What does it matter if you're buying the sweatshirt from me or from American Apparel or anybody else? There's got to be an emotional connection and music is one way to create emotional connection and it's the lifestyle around it. So I think every brand, every operator should have its DNA mix of things where it's the colors, it's the visual, it's the music, it's the taste, it's the smell, it's the flavor, it's all those things.
So for us, we put, somebody put over here something about Kith Treats. Kith Treats was born because my partner, Ronnie, is obsessed with cereal. So how do we make cereal for everyone to make... So, we took the ice cream and then mixed with all the cereals and created because he grew up on cereal. And that's kind of like the brand DNA because he is the creative director and he is the one who exposing himself and his love and passion to things through the brand. And everything that he created is a reflection of his lifestyle and everything that he's all about.
Lionel Ohayon (27:41):
And to that point, and we were talking about music and cereal, it's like a pinpoint brand to a moment in your life that was positive and that was free and was something that you actually have a positive memory with. And that's super important for people to understand about what brands need to do to become meaningful. So, does it mean that people... We're doing a project and I'm like, breakfast in America by Supertramp from 1:15 til 2:02. We play the whole album. People, you don't play a whole album anymore. But if you did, if you were like... I'm old so I'm saying Supertramp. But, it's this understanding about what kind of [inaudible 00:28:24] time do you want from people? How do you want to create community in your space and what kind of buy in do you want to have authenticity? And I know that no one wants to use word authenticity, well authenticity in a way that actually gives you a way to sort of connect with people.
And I think cereal, Ronnie got it. We have three small kids now, two of them are eating cereal already and it's kind of like cereal's the whole connection to your youth. And your youth is your time when you're most untarnished about your ideals. And Kith is an untarnished idea. It's like this is a pure vision idea that people are responding to in a real way. Can you speak to a little bit about Kith and the riots in New York and where you guys found yourself and how you responded to all that?
sam ben avraham (29:18):
We got into this whole COVID situation. In March, we made all the alterations to the brand. We had everyone working very... The company was actually very functional online, I must say, opposed to people come to the office. It was a very efficient operation. And then the whole Black Lives Matter came right after and I think a lot of the brands found themselves in a position of almost like in a different situation where everybody being attacked for something. Everybody in America felt like they're being attacked and no matter what you say, wouldn't be good enough.
Lionel Ohayon (30:15):
You can't find any stable ground to stand on.
sam ben avraham (30:19):
You can't because you get shot for anything. You get shot for saying something. You get shot for not saying something. It was a very hard moment for everyone that I've been talking to in the industry. And there's a lot of pain from people about injustice, across the board. They had to take it out. They had to take it out on the street with burning stuff and destroying stuff. And they had to take it out on the web in many different ways. Just like flowing, shooting arrows at people. And I think now, not that it's over, but people start realizing that it's better to communicate and it's better to fix things instead of just doing this, going into this cancel mode of like anybody that said something or didn't say something or thought about something, just to move and cancel the brand. Instead of that, let's educate people and work with them. And that's where the stage is that we are now. We really went back to our employees and had very open conversations about internally and trying to understand what changes we need to make internally for that. And then once we [inaudible 00:32:00] internally, we actually looking to see how can we engage with the community and do more for the community. I think for us it was a very good interesting learning experience to go through.
Lionel Ohayon (32:19):
I think it's an important topic and it's not easy to manifest a solution. Like you said, it's very hard to step here or step there and I understand that. And I understand the fury. Even saying I understand the fury, people will say to me, "You don't understand the fury because you don't understand the fury." But, I think that that convergence of all these factors, retail was in trouble long before this started. Digital is-
sam ben avraham (32:51):
The writing was on the wall for a long time. This was just instead of having a very long painful death, that was like-
Lionel Ohayon (33:00):
Let's just rid ourselves of this nonsense. So now you're like, okay. We have, all of us, it requires city and state and banks and landlords and creatives and artists and retailers and people who have a passion to tell their story. We may be talking internationally, but Sam and I were talking New York because that's what we know and what we've lived. But, the opportunity to say, when people chose to march down the street, they chose Broadway because that's a street that everybody wants to say, it wasn't like there was a big, let's march up Broadway three, four nights and start to expand beyond that. Because everybody wants to choose a place that is like equal footing, equal ground and you have-
sam ben avraham (33:46):
Broadway because Broadway goes across the town from west down east, crossing every neighborhood, uptown, downtown and midtown. And I think it always symbolize the melting pot of New York City.
Lionel Ohayon (34:02):
And I just think that if you can find a way that Broadway answers the question for everybody, it's my street. I don't feel like a stranger on that street. I won't get looked at sideways if I walk in the store, if I'm walking down the street. There's stores spilling out, if we start to create indoor street scapes. If we do all this stuff to just allow that... The city needs to embrace the idea that it's an organism and you got to let people enjoy it. You go to let people engage and not gentrify people out of it. It has to be inclusionary. It has to allow everyone to have a part of it. I think that, to me, it's a total tragedy what's happened to that street in the last 25 years. It's [crosstalk 00:34:46]-
sam ben avraham (34:47):
I would love to see Broadway becoming one massive bike lane. I think instead of having all those small bike lanes on the street are very dangerous. I'm scared to ride my bicycle in New York City. It's scary. Between the taxi drivers, it's not a comfortable-
Lionel Ohayon (35:10):
I think that's an interesting question about retail. The future of retail is about meandering and experiencing and finding things. And the idea that you're like, the answers not like, "Well, how will I get a cab when I leave with 10 bags." You're like, "You don't leave with 10 bags. We have technology that'll send your 10 bags home. Now go walk on the street where there's experiences and there's things happening and there's a band playing and there's outdoor seating and whatnot. We have to use both parts to it. But at the core of it, like you and I both, I know we both share this idea even though we can disagree on a million things, is it's about the soul of the city. Retail is a kind of shared experience that everybody has. It's not going to be solved and we probably haven't touched on technology enough, but it's-
sam ben avraham (36:03):
I think there's enough technology to facilitate anything. I think the main problem is the desire. How to create the desire for someone to leave the house and come back to the street and be part of it? Then, there's enough technology to facilitate anything today.
Lionel Ohayon (36:24):
Here's a question that came up. It's "How do you guys think emerging technology, augmented reality, increasing personalization from data, et cetera, can be used to synergize well with someone's physical retail experience? And how should it not be used? Also, shout out to Kith Treats."
sam ben avraham (36:46):
Thank you for the shout out. We looking onto all of those technologies. At the end of the day, we're kind of like choosing in the interface that is actually more simple. We're simplifying the online for now and we're really focusing on the more physical location activation and how can we bring physical and make it more interesting. And I think then the follow up is always on the online. We really believe that everybody focusing too much of technology and how to go online and how to go online. I think the emotional connection needs to be on a physical and that's where we put in most of our effort. And then behind the scene, yes, there's a lot of technology, but I think simplifying the connection and simplifying the process is the key for everything.
Lionel Ohayon (37:53):
I agree with that 100%. I know we're running out of time here, but there's a couple things I think are important. I think that the convergence of, to make it simple, the convergence of retail and entertainment, those seem obvious and they seem like everyone's poking around it. And we need to understand physical retail as an experiential opportunity for people to have entertainment. And people's entertainment dollars are trying to be spent on a lot of come to this show, come to that show, come to this... You've got all of these pop up museums of and all this kind of stuff that's super temporal.
Everyone's trying to get your $39. Come to the museum of this, to the museum of that or come to this experiential show or this immersive experience and all these things because they're lacking the opportunity to have an immersive experience of spend the day shopping and grab a coffee and maybe have an afternoon glass of wine with your friend and then walk around the streets and meet some people and end up in a park. That's immersive experience at its best. That's a city that's healthy. That doesn't require you to pay $39.
sam ben avraham (39:01):
Best days we ever had was the days that were never planned.
Lionel Ohayon (39:04):
Yeah. You just were meandering the streets and figure out.
sam ben avraham (39:06):
Leave the house, meet some friends and you end up in some random...
Lionel Ohayon (39:11):
All of this stuff being packaged into these experiences that can then be proliferated on social media for you to come and find this Valhalla that you don't find because the cities are sick. And I do want to emphasize that this is not a cataclysmic moment in time. This is a moment for New York to reinvent itself. This is a moment for New York to be like, and never bet against New York City and never bet against real human interaction and I think that, again I apologize if we're to New York centric on this conversation, but that's what we know.
But, there is an opportunity right now to grab this thing and really just say, "This is what we want to be." And whoever raises their hand and says, "We want it to be will," will have a seat at that table. And it's not us. Sam and I are probably too old for it. It's probably younger people, but we can just help encourage them because like, "Tell your story. Bring your story out loud. Be the voice. It's your turn to make this reality true." Because I sometimes joke in the studio that we're like millennial consultants to CEOs. They're like, "What do I do? I don't know what to do." And as a young generation has a big voice and it's time to bring it forward.
sam ben avraham (40:26):
By the way, I just want to say something about the technology and data that [inaudible 00:40:32]. For our brand, we feel like we are storytellers. We really communicate to the consumer. We're telling the stories of [inaudible 00:40:47] and my partner Ronnie is a very good storyteller. And we don't really use any, we don't advertise. We don't pay for anything on the Internet because I think we are very good storytellers. And I think that's what a lot of people are missing, a genuine story that going to be told. That it's going to create the connection, the emotional connection with the brand. And when you don't have that, you need to push, to push, to push. We don't really push, we just putting the stuff out there and telling the story and creating beautiful product that are coming from the inside. And that's how we build the brand that it doesn't need a heavy push from the outside.
Lionel Ohayon (41:39):
Yeah, that's awesome. Well look, I think we're pushing up against time. Please don't bet against New York City. And the future of retail and its demise have largely been exaggerated. There are only experiments and new things to come that are going to be I think wildly interesting. I believe that we have a really, really great moment right now to grab a hold of it and invent it.
sam ben avraham (42:08):
I am a very big believer in a lot of great things are going to come out of this disaster.
Lionel Ohayon (42:22):
All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. My name's Lionel Ohayon from ICRAVE. Sam Ben-Avraham from Kith. I hope you guys enjoyed your time with us and if you have any questions, we'll find a way to follow through.