Amazon now does haircuts – WSJ

Amazon.

com Inc. opened her first hair salon on Tuesday. Located in the Spitalfields shopping district of London, Amazon Salon offers hairdressing services dressed with technology, including augmented reality hair consultations.

The 1,500-square-foot two-story store also includes entertainment streaming on Amazon Fire tablets and a test of a new point and learn experience for brick-and-mortar stores. The technology allows customers to point to an item on a shelf to display product information on a screen mounted behind it.

Consumers wishing to purchase items such as hair conditioner should scan the QR codes displayed on the shelf to order them for home delivery on Amazon’s UK website.

Amazon said in a statement that the space was designed as an experiential location showcasing new products and technology. The company hopes to provide customers with a new experience that will also benefit the wider salon industry, an Amazon spokeswoman said when asked about the site’s broader business purpose.

Amazon has made name and money from ecommerce, digital subscriptions, and other web services, but has entered physical retail in ways small and large in recent years. After opening mall kiosks to sell Amazon-branded appliances and accessories and apparel, the company opened its first bookstore in Seattle in 2015. In 2017, it bought upscale supermarket chain Whole Foods for $ 13.7 billion and then opened a number of stores to showcase the cashier-less Just Walk Out technology, including Go and Go Grocery. It also operates stores that only sell goods with ratings of four stars and above on its e-commerce marketplace

With technology in the Amazon Salon, customers can use augmented reality to try out a hair color before the dye is used up.


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Amazon

The opening of Amazon Salon further reaffirms the company’s interest in retail and may reflect its ambitions in markets that combine both goods and services, said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at marketing and communications firm Publicis Groupe SA. The technology giant already operates Amazon Home Services, which allows customers in some cities to hire outside contractors for odd jobs like furniture assembly.

But service-heavy companies tend not to scale as well as tech industry companies, given their reliance on labor, Mr. Goldberg added.

“So my immediate reaction is that the professional services aspect is some kind of necessary evil to them, and they are doing this to gain some credibility and a foothold” in the professional beauty space, he said. “But Amazon has surprised us before, and I certainly wouldn’t tell the bank that they have no ambitions to make money off this.”

The opening of the salon follows the launch of a professional beauty division on Amazon’s UK website, offering local hair and beauty products for spas and salons. Amazon Salon services are provided by Elena Lavagni, owner of Neville Hair & Beauty, an independent salon in London.

John Boumphrey, Amazon’s country manager in the UK, said in a statement that Amazon wants the new space to be a place “where we can partner with the industry and test new technologies.”

The salon could also be designed as a showroom for such innovations: the company began to license its Just Walk Out technology to other retailers after proving it worked in its own stores, and could do the same with innovations such as the point and learn experience, mr. Goldberg said.

Amazon Salon is currently only accessible to Amazon employees. The general public can sign up for appointments in the coming weeks, the company said, adding that it currently has no plans to open any more salon locations.

Write to Katie Deighton at [email protected]

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