How Best Buy is rethinking retail footprints for AI products like Ray-Ban Meta glasses

This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, special projects editor Melissa Daniels sat down with Best Buy’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer, Patrick McGinnis, to go behind the scenes into the development of the new 30-by-30-foot Meta AI shop-in-shops rolling out in select stores.

It’s the latest example of how Best Buy is looking to position itself as a destination for cutting-edge technology — and it’s also a case study into how legacy retailers can rethink the store experience for new audiences. Best Buy plans to have 50 stores selling the new Ray-Ban Meta frames by the end of the year, with the hopes of increasing that to as many as 200 or more by the end of next year, McGinnis said.

The company knows there’s demand for people to check out the specs in person; its own survey data shows that more than 50% of Best Buy customers say they want to see the Meta glasses in person before making a purchase. And since the retailer first launched smaller displays in 100 stores last October, more than 175,000 customers have completed a demo in a Best Buy store.

But beyond creating a destination for people to try out cutting-edge tech in person, the shop-in-shop provided an opportunity for Best Buy to revamp its store layout, McGinnis said. It aims to have more flexible space for experiential retail, including for more AI-powered products, on the horizon.

How to showcase new tech

One clear priority for Best Buy when launching the Meta AI shop-in-shops was placement: Customers will see Meta Ray-Bans as soon as they walk into the store, as the 900-square-foot space is front and center. It looks something like an optical store, where people can try on glasses. They can also have associates help with the fit aspects of the more advanced frames, like the Meta Ray-Ban Display that comes with a neural band.

“For me, it’s creating something that gives customers a reason to make the trip to Best Buy, and it almost turns the stores into a bit of a playground again,” he said. “If you go back 10 or 20 years ago, consumer electronics stores and Best Buy were places that people would go to just to see new technology and experience it. Digital kind of changed everything, and I think we see stores now coming back as places to go and just discover, and see what’s new.”

Rethinking big-box footprints

Putting the shop-in-shops in place requires more than moving furniture around, McGinnis said. It also requires rethinking processes, like whether products should be tied down for security purposes. “On the walls you have a lot of different frame styles and colors that we’ve enabled customers to try on without a tether, and that’s something that typically, in a retail environment, you wouldn’t necessarily do, particularly with technology products. So that’s an assumption that we had to challenge as part of the design of this,” he said.

More broadly, McGinnis said the “reflow” of the stores includes putting computing, the biggest section of the store, at the center. Then the perimeter of the stores will remain more flexible for future shop-in-shops, pop-ups or other experiential retail displays. Best Buy executives have said they want to become a hub for AI-enabled products, and McGinnis said the new reflow will allow the company to implement that more quickly.

“It’s not really easy to go into a store and find an open 30-by-30 foot space or even a 10-by-10 foot space to do something,” he said. “The intention behind this was to make the ability to do something like this easy and to be able to do it fast. And by freeing up all that space at once, it gives us the ability to move really swiftly on something like this.”

Training up staff

But the key to the experience, McGinnis said, is ensuring Best Buy associates, or “expert blue shirts,” know how the product works and can lead customers through the experience. McGinnis said 300 associates attended a weeklong training at company headquarters this summer to learn more about the glasses and how to showcase the functions to customers based on their needs and interests.

“Every customer is coming at this from a different place,” he said. “You have to make sure that the questions you’re asking are getting that customer’s passion points out, so you can match the capabilities of the product to what their needs are.”

That includes addressing potential questions around privacy or safety concerns, as some onlookers have raised concerns about the wearer’s ability to covertly record people. Others have concerns about what happens to images or information they are capturing. “Privacy is a top-of-mind topic for our customers,” McGinnis said. “Our role is to help demystify the technology,  and really help customers understand what it can and can’t do.”