AT& T Store Joins Flashy Chinatown Crowd

You start to see a glimmer of fluorescent orange lights from the bottom of the escalator at the Chinatown Metro stop. By the time you've reached the top step, you're surrounded by a barrage of images dancing on the windows that double as movie screens.

It's AT&T's flashy new store that officially opened last week at the corner of Seventh and H streets N.W. in Chinatown. The store, which cost more than $1 million to renovate, is the wireless company's latest effort to tout new cellphone services and handsets, not to mention its exclusive deal to carry Apple's iPhone.

Colin Martin, AT&T's executive director of sales in the Washington region, said he's been working on opening a store in Chinatown for more than a year to take advantage of the neighborhood's high foot traffic and bustling retail scene.

"It's the busiest pedestrian intersection in Washington," he said, citing market research firm Kinetic, which estimates about 100,000 people pass through every day. Since the store quietly opened early this month, it is "already trending to be one of the busiest [AT&T] stores in the country," he said.

Highly stimulating "experience" stores have become popular in recent years, especially since Apple found success with its airy stores that put its best-selling gadgets on display. Many electronics makers have followed suit, including Sony and Bose. Telecoms have been getting into the experience-store game, too, letting customers text, surf the Web and play games on phones hooked up to their networks. In 2006, Verizon opened a Verizon Experience store in Fairfax, its second in the country, where the company demonstrates its Fios Internet and TV services as well as its wireless offerings.

AT&T opened its first experience store last year in Houston and has about a dozen others around the country. In those stores, AT&T demonstrates its U-verse TV and high-speed Internet services. But since the company does not offer those services in the Washington area, AT&T's Chinatown location focuses on its wireless assets. (AT&T calls it a "flagship," not experience, store.) In addition to its iPhone display, the store shows off phone features, such as music services and other accessories. It will soon add interactive tables powered by Microsoft that allow customers to automatically add features and applications to their phones simply by placing the device on a table.

But not all experience stores are created equal, said branding expert Rob Frankel. Many technology companies have tried to copy Apple's success by opening their own version of the experience store, but they have not put enough of their own brand's flavor into the retail hot spots.

"Forget the interactive displays, it's the vibe you get when you walk into the place," Frankel said. "Apple stores are as much a social scene as anything else. . . . Just throwing cellphones at people won't work."

-- Kim Hart