Newegg opens showroom at warehouse in Industry
INDUSTRY >> While most retail stores braced for a surge of Black Friday shoppers, online electronics giant Newegg quietly opened a new consumer showroom aimed at bringing a brick and mortar experience to its previously virtual customers.
The Industry-based online retailer started in 2001 by Tawainese immigrant Fred Chang built itself upon the specialization of its product, which is largely aimed at technology enthusiasts and do-it-yourself computer builders.
The Newegg Hybrid Center combines the company’s will-call service with a newly added electronics showroom and continues that mentality by offering customers a chance to experiment with cutting-edge technology that might show up in grand halls of box stores, according to Soren Mills, chief marketing director. The Hybrid Center is located at the company’s warehouse at 18045 Rowland Street in Industry. The center is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“It’s a new concept in retail, it’s more than a store,” Mills said of the showroom. “It gives our customer a reason to come back and visit us. You can come pick up your product and discover something new.”
The showroom’s small size allows Newegg to tailor the experience to its type of customer, rather than trying to appeal to every demographic, Mills said.
While the showroom did not draw huge crowds of deal-seekers, Newegg anticipates shipping out more than 250,000 packages per day company-wide between the start of Black Friday and the end of Cyber Monday, according to Kunal Thakkar, the company’s senior vice president of operations. The company employs about 125 people at each of its six warehouses in the United States.
“We have four times as many orders today,” Thakkar said on Black Friday.
The company’s will-call service alone expected 15,000 pick-ups, according to Mills.
That will-call service has existed for several years, but previously customers had little to do while waiting for the product to get pulled off Newegg’s massive warehouse shelves, Mills said.
That customer now has access to 4K televisions; gaming consoles such as the Playstation 4 and Xbox One; laptops; tablets and wearable technology. Most of the products include a tag with a barcode that a customer can scan with a smartphone to bring up Newegg’s website. They can then buy and pick-up the new purchase almost immediately, Mills said.
Some of the technology on display is not even produced for consumers yet. One product included a glasses-free 3D television developed by Stream TV Networks, which is based in Philadelphia and the Netherlands.
“It doesn’t exist in the world,” said Grazina Seskeviciute, Stream TV Network’s content specialist. The technology will eventually include a built-in chipset in the television that converts any image into a 3D one, without the need for glasses, she said. The depth of the image maintains at any viewing angle, she added.
The television is slated to appear before consumers in the first quarter of 2014, but the prototype will stay on display at Newegg’s showroom until Tuesday, Seskeviciute said.
The new showroom highlights the significant growth Newegg has seen in selling consumer electronics, but Mills stressed that the company has no desire to move away from the computer components that it built its reputation on.
“That’s not the direction that we want to take,” he said.
Newegg will open showrooms in the near future at Newegg’s warehouses in New Jersey, Tennessee, Toronto and Indianapolis, Mills said.
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