[Off George St Opposite Mid City] Sydney, New South Wales, 2000 View Map to store MONDAY - WEDNESDAY 10AM TO 6.30PM THURSDAY 10AM TO 9PM FRIDAY 10AM TO 6.30PM SATURDAY 10AM TO 6.30PM SUNDAY 11AM TO 6PM T. +61 2 9279 4066 Shop 1/ 265 Little Bourke Street, View Map to Store MONDAY - WEDNESDAY 10AM TO 7PM THURSDAY - FRIDAY 10AM TO 9PM SATURDAY 10AM TO 7PM SUNDAY 11AM TO 7PM T. +61 3 9650 1933 Shop K-0060 Chadstone Shopping Centre MONDAY - WEDNESDAY 9AM TO 5.30PM THURSDAY - FRIDAY 9AM TO 9PM SATURDAY 9AM TO 6PM SUNDAY 10AM TO 5PM T. +61 3 9563 1244 Shop 1558, Ground Floor Pacific Fair Shopping Centre FRIDAY 10AM TO 7PM SUNDAY 10AM TO 6PM T. +61 7 5527 5188 SBiD holders, log in for a faster checkout. Select your location and currency to display options for that region. GST is payable on items shipped to an Australian address. Payment for your Order will be taken when you place it.
We will refund your payment where your Order is not accepted or cancelled in accordance with our full terms and conditions which can be view by clicking here. We will take reasonable precautions to ensure that your credit/debit card details supplied to us are kept secure. We provide the option for you to safely store your credit card details, making it quicker and simpler to shop with us. Your full card details will never be displayed, a masked number is displayed so you know which of your cards you are using. You can amend and delete your card details at any time by using the secure account area. We offer a variety of payment options and these are shown on the Site. When making a payment via a credit card will accept VISA or MasterCard. The use of AMEX is also accepted provided the purchase is made in AUD. 265/279 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000, AustraliaThe way in which we shop has changed dramatically over the past few years. Yet as High Street shopping is replaced with the convenience of the online store, the experience of touching, trying, and smelling an object will never be replaced.
Whilst some of the larger chains are struggling to implement web based change, the new Sneakerboy concept store is taking it to another level. The first of many to be rolled out, Sneakerboy Melbourne is at the cusp of this retail revolution. It is an online store you can walk in to; there is no stock, no cash, no till, and no product to take home. All that is needed to make a purchase in the store is a smart phone, (or one of the in-store Ipads) and a Sneakerboy ID. The rest of the available space is dedicated to the range of shoes, which means Sneakerboy can boast a larger range of stock on a much smaller footprint. The architecture and the branding of the store, (also designed at March Studio), follows this underlying business structure, and yet also brings the digital connectivity to the forefront. Sneakerboy Melbourne consists of two main areas; the display area and the fitting room. These two areas are expressed in the façade, a large circular steel portal directs the customer to the entrance and into the viewing chamber, whilst obscure glass blocks create a private, fitting room bathed in natural light.
The display area is designed with the same retro futurism of an Underground station, a reference to the sneaker’s rise to fashion in New York’s transport strike of 1966. Illuminated curved glass shelves house the entire range of sneakers, a viewing canvas for 162 individual shoes, which can be dimmed and adjusted by changing the lighting. Scrolling LED tickers under each sneaker display the shoe’s designer. Customers are invited to scan the product with the Sneakerboy App for pricing and sizing, and the LED’s, a portal into the online store, can react and respond to online activity, displaying comments like “Just bought in Shanghai” or “Sold out”. 1200 metres of cabling, reminiscent of a server room, is le exposed through the glass shelves rather than hidden away, a reminder of the hard wired nature of technology and connectivity. Customers are invited into the fitting room to check sizing and to make purchases. Constructed from 300 blackened steel pigeon holes, the fitting room is conceived as a library, housing all sizes of all styles.
6 custom spun steel chairs with integrated Ipad holders anchor the room and give the customers the opportunity to browse online and purchase whilst trying on.Shop Sneakers Shop ClothingAustralian inventory-less retailer Sneakerboy, having already made headlines with their showroom-style direct shipping model, expand on their spaces with a new store in Sydney. Boasting the same futuristic buildout as its sister locations and stocking everything from Rick Owens and Maison Martin Margiela to Nike and Reebok, the store offers customers to purchase products using the Sneakerboy smartphone app or via on of the store’s iPads. Head over to the Sneakerboy website for further information, or if you’re in the area go pay the store a visit yourself:MELBOURNE, Australia — On Little Bourke Street in Melbourne’s central business district, a subway-like tunnel leads into a polished concrete shrine to one of the most coveted products in modern luxury menswear. Inside, on shiny illuminated shelves outfitted with digital displays, the walls are dripping with hundreds of pairs of sneakers from Balenciaga, Rick Owens, Pierre Hardy, Raf Simons, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Lanvin, Kris van Assche, Maison Martin Margiela, Christopher Kane, Giuseppe Zanotti and others, as well as special lines, limited-edition collections, collaborations and pre-releases by Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Diemme, Common Projects and Boris Bidjan Saberi.
This high-tech retail temple, named Sneakerboy, is the brainchild of Chris Kyvetos, 30, former creative director and buyer at Australian men’s department store Harrolds and a long-time sneaker enthusiast, whose carefully laid plans to target a rapidly emerging generation of luxury consumers with an offering focused on trainers were lent credence, late last year, when Balenciaga announced the appointment of its new designer “Here was an established French house making a move that was previously unimaginable: appointing a 29-year-old Taiwanese kid, with sportswear influences... It said that this generation of luxury consumer needed to be taken seriously.” For Kyvetos, sneakers were the answer. Indeed, buoyed, in part, by the rising tide of a new luxury consumer — who is more likely to be a 35-year-old living in Asia than a 55-year-old based in the West — the humble sneaker has seen its status shoot up from streetwear symbol to luxury icon. “The Asian kids were always shy about whether they could wear Dior Homme by Hedi Slimane, but they would come and pick up a pair of his sneakers and say, I’ll take those,” recalls Kyvetos.
“Buying sneakers was the way that the kids were buying into the luxury brands that I was dealing with at the time: Lanvin, Dior, Raf Simons, Rick Owens.” Kyvetos traces the rise of the luxury sneaker back to a pivotal Dior Homme show in 2004: “It was on July 5th, 2004. Hedi Slimane sent a young Australian design assistant, Jordan Askill, out in a pair of Dior Homme high-tops and a trench coat with the sleeves rolled up. I walked out of there thinking: the rules have been broken.” For Kyvetos, other key moments in the genealogy of the luxury sneaker include Raf Simons’ Olympics-inspired collection for Spring 2005, Rick Owens’ debut of his now classic “Geobaskets” and Alber Elbaz’s introduction of patent toe cap sneakers for Lanvin, “which became an icon of the industry forever,” he says. “But there have been a some very important events in the last 12 to 18 months,” he continues. “Hedi Slimane moving the Saint Laurent Paris offices to LA, the rise of Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and — again — Balenciaga’s appointment of Alexander Wang.
I felt these were really significant moments in the history of luxury brands and Sneakerboy was about the chance to really represent this.” To turn his vision into a reality, Kyvetos turned to Harrolds founder Theo Poulakis and financier Guy Obeid. “I’ve been really lucky because I knew the guys who could back me. I don’t really see them as investors; I see them as my partners. We work together really closely. Guy is running the business side of Sneakerboy as interim CEO and Theo wouldn’t let us give him a title, but I guess you would call him a non- executive director.” So far, so good. But tapping a new generation of luxury consumers required a next generation retail model. “Young people know what they want; they are used to controlling their own environment, they shop online. I think they should be able to do that in the store as well. Our customers can come in, see an amazing range of products that are relevant to their tastes. They can touch it, feel it, try it on, then scan it themselves, check if their size is available, then buy it from an iPad or phone and it will be delivered within three days,” explains Kyvetos.
Like Apple stores, Sneakerboy has no fixed points of sale. Instead, consumers check out via a Sneakerboy app (on their own phones or in-store iPads) that remembers their shoe size, payment preferences and purchase history — and provides tailored information about new products. What’s more, the store’s product release cycle is more in tune with the rhythm of the Internet than traditional seasonal drops, peppering a constantly updated, seasonless feed of new products with “quick strike” releases of special limited editions. But perhaps most importantly, Sneakerboy houses no purchasable inventory on site, only a range of samples in various sizes for fitting purposes. All transactions are processed via a single web platform and product ships from a logistics hub in Hong Kong, which means quick deliveries to China. It also means that Sneakerboy’s sales productivity per square foot — the critical metric for retail performance — is expected to be much higher than traditional stores, which devote around 50 percent of their square footage to storing inventory, an expensive proposition in prime retail precincts.
In contrast, Sneakerboy is able to deliver a product assortment that would normally occupy far more space, at a fraction of the cost. The company’s Melbourne store is only 80 square metres, with a full 77 square metres devoted to product display, making it a highly efficient use of real estate. “As a multi-brand retailer we don’t have the margins of a vertically integrated business, so we think the efficiencies, both in the stores and with a centralised stock holding will hopefully help us to fund growth,” says Obeid. With a second location set to open in Sydney in October and ambitious plans for store expansion across the Pacific Rim — in South Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong — Kyvetos’ vision for Sneakerboy’s fresh-out-of-the-box retail model, which unites the tactility of a physical store with the efficiency of the Internet, is firmly fixed on the future. A version of this article first appeared in a special print edition of The Business of Fashion, published to accompany the launch of the BoF 500.