Make It Matter!

Apple...the New Hard Rock Cafe?

Anyone who isn't living under a rock knows Apple has been quietly taking over the world during the past ten years or so. While Apple has always been a company many kept in their view out of the corner of our eye given its coolness, the early days seemed to be concentrated on a small group of sort of hippy-ish people. Then came the iPod...and the adventure into main stream began exploding. If you didn't have an iPod, well you didn't have your very own personal music store! After the iPod introduction we simply watched the iPod get smaller and smaller and hold more and more music - we were truly amazed!

Next the iPhone. Most thought it would never really catch on big and that the Blackberry was the winner. After all the iPhone was very expensive and lacked a keyboard. Well, now the iPhone is the leading smart phone and along with our iPods we're beginning to say but don't i need an iPad and iMac too? Just amazing how this brand has taken over our lives by a guy named Steve Jobs.
Even the Apple stores early on seemed more like a museum than a hard core retailer - akin to the Nike stores. But then that too began to go main stream like Starbucks with a store in almost every mall on the planet! Their biggest store, 23,000 s.f. just opened in NYC's Grand Central Terminal replacing former tenant Charlie Palmer's Metrazur restaurant, who Apple reportedly paid $5 million to vacate the location early.

And now the crowds build for every store opening and there are actually groupies that attend every store grand opening hoping to be one of the first 100 to receive the grand opening T-shirt...attempting to collect them all. The grand-opening shirts and their minimalist design hark to the first of Apple's more than 300 stores, which launched in McLean, Va., and Glendale, Calif., over a decade ago. Most are black with white lettering. But Apple sometimes marks major new openings with a special design or color, such as red for this year's Hong Kong debut.

I'm quite surprised that Apple hasn't designed the T-shirts to feed the collection (or should we say bragging rights) fever and steal a page from the Hard Rock Cafe...same logo on every shirt with a simple listing of the city below the logo. "Oh, were you at the Beijing China Apple store opening? Wow aren't you cool!"

All I can say is it seems everything Apple does is well planned and thought out...they Make It Matter and have built one of the largest most loved brands in the world!