This year sees Apple celebrate ten years in retail, a milestone that has seen the company overhaul the way it advertises its products in store.
However, if you go back behind the public storefront, Apple has introduced a new set of posters in staff areas in numerous Apple Stores, telling the story of the company’s ten years in retail, describing the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows.
In 1,812 words and 125 sentences, Apple thanks its customers, reveals subtle facts about its stores (its Paris store required 500,000 tiles in its restoration), highlights mistakes – like when it opened a store on Tyson’s Corner and found out that within 30 minutes of the store opening that the stainless steel surfaces needed polishing – finishing with the suggestion that ten years is just the start.
Some other interesting points that we found include:
- We even built a full-scale facade of the Regent Street store in a Cupertino parking lot to be sure the design was right. Which taught us the value of seeing things full size.
- Speaking of T-shirts, we’ve learned more than you can imagine about our own. We’ve found that when we wear black T-shirts, we blend in. And when we wear too many colors it’s confusing. But blue shirts are just right. We’ve also learned that it takes precisely 4,253 stitches to embroider the Apple logo on those blue shirts. And we even figured out which direction the stitches should go in.
- We’ve also learned that due to the exceptional quality of our applicants, it can be harder to be hired at the Apple Store than in Cupertino. It can sometimes take two to three years to bring someone in.
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We have embedded a PDF recreation of the poster below so that you can read the whole thing in the way it should:
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