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A touch screen through which it is possible to book 30 minutes to spend with three friends (or girlfriends: as long as the total is a maximum of four people) in a spacious dressing room with lights and music at the customer’s discretion where they can try on a potentially infinite number of items and accessories with the assistance of dedicated personnel. And, you can bet, post them on social media. That’s not all: thanks to a system hidden inside the candy pink walls, this dressing room in a hi-tech and extra large version recognizes all the items brought inside and, through a screen, suggests possible looks and combinations. What you choose to buy can be paid for directly in this fitting lounge which also has a “digital” dressing room covered in QR codes that allow you to take countless selfies with different filters through the augmented reality of
Snapchat and developed by DRESSX. For the record, everything has no cost: booking is free.
This is one of the flagships of the renovated Bershka flagship store at 22 Corso Vittorio Emanuele. A small jewel also in terms of interior design: it was designed by the OMA studio, founded by Rem Kolhaas, who in Italy is mostly associated with the Prada group for which he designed several stores around the world, the Foundation in Milan and several set designs of shows, but who has created many high-profile projects including the Casa da Música in Porto and the Seattle Public Library. The Dutch studio has developed a new concept in collaboration with the AMO think tank (which also belongs to OMA) which has two objectives: to provide a shopping experience that is as integrated as possible between online and offline and to satisfy customer needs in terms of speed of purchase. Which can be fast – ranging from the automatic click&collect area for those who have even purchased online who use the store only to collect the goods, to the automatic checkouts on each floor, up to the digital fitting rooms – or slower, in the fitting lounge, like the one described a few lines above.
The idea is to attract an audience of digital natives (teenagers and twenty-year-olds, mostly) and to make the store a unique destination in terms of service and product, thanks to some exclusive products such as the RAL7000STUDIO x BERSHKA footwear collection , a super limited black re-edition of made in Italy footwear and the Generation Bershka capsule which was created for the 25th anniversary of the brand and is exclusive for seven days in the Milan flagship.
Italy is a very important market for the Inditex group brand and, considering the strong international attraction exerted by Milan at the moment, the opening of the flagship represents a double test for the Galician group: on the one hand, the reception is measured of the local public and on the other that of tourists.
Inditex, the group to which Bershka belongs, closed the first half of 2023 with more positive numbers than expected: sales grew by +13.5% (+16.6% at constant exchange rates) compared to the same period of 2022, reaching 16.9 billion euros. Gross profit increased by 14.1% to 9.8 billion euros. Ebitda increased by 15.7%, reaching 4.7 billion euros, while net profit jumped by 40.1%, reaching 2.5 billion euros. In this scenario, Bershka achieved a +12.3% in sales, which went from just over one billion in the first half of 2022 to 1.18 billion in the first six months of the current fiscal year.