Apple Watch retail store launch after multi-month delay
Each Apple product launch is kicked off with a media event, tons of headlines, and a highly publicized launch date a few days later. Now that Apple is finally beginning to sell the Watch in its stores, I wonder what happens. How does Apple signal to people that now is the time to go ahead and go buy one. It can’t hold another launch event, because it already did that back in April when it had basically no inventory to sell. It can’t begin running television ads, because already it’s spent the past two months running those ads nonstop.
So instead of Apple Watch sales kicking off with a bang, as is the case for all of its other launches, this will begin with a trickle. People going into Apple Stores for other reasons, seeing that the Watch is now finally available, and buying it. Other people seeing it in the wild, asking when it’s going to be available and finding out they can get one now, and so on. Based on the ton of online sales racked up back in April in the few hours before Apple ran out of inventory, this was on pace to be the highest-sales launch in Apple history. Instead it’s going to have to build gradually on word of mouth, because Apple already long ago used up its usual firepower in terms of letting people know that it was time to go buy it.
It’ll still vastly outsell all other smartwatch products combined, but that’s not saying much. So now with this retail rollout finally happening, we’ll find out just how much momentum has been lost due to this profoundly botched launch. Apple could have gotten away with screwing up the launch of a new iPhone this badly, because that’s a familiar product and people already know whether they want it. But the Watch is all about convincing people to gamble on a new kind of product that up to now they’ve gotten by just fine without, and I don’t know how these delays and fake launches will end up impacting that.
I’m not surprised that Apple is already saying the second generation Watch software will arrive in the fall, and while this is just speculation, I wouldn’t be shocked if a slightly tweaked Apple Watch 2.0 hardware arrives in the fall as well. After all, Apple is going to have to hold another launch, and fairly soon, if it wants to kickstart on a large scale the mainstream momentum that’s been lost between April and now.
There are some comparisons to be drawn with Google Glass, whose launch was also terribly botched, though it was such a weird product it wouldn’t have succeeded anyway. After Google initially put Glass in the hands of a few people, it waited so long to publicly put it on sale that by that time, most of the public had already assumed it had flopped or been canceled.
To a lesser extent, Apple runs that risk here. Two months into the product’s life, you don’t see many people with an Apple Watch because so few were made available for preorder. Anyone who has tried to buy one in an Apple Store up to this point has been turned away without any indication or when they might be able to get one. Do they come back and buy now? Do they wait for 2.0 instead? Have they already rationalized that since they weren’t allowed to buy one, they don’t need one anyway? I don’t know.
I’ll be disappointed if such an important and groundbreaking product ends up not becoming a mainstream hit simply because Apple mishandled every aspect of its launch. The Apple Watch is too good to go the way of Google Glass, so I suspect it’ll take off in the fall if it doesn’t take off now. But I guess we’ll see.
