Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked about doing it on
When the revised prototype was finally completed in January 2001, Jobs allowed the board to see it for the first time. He explained the theories behind the design by sketching on a whiteboard; then he loaded board members into a van for the two-mile trip. When they saw what Jobs and Johnson had built, they unanimously approved going ahead. It would, the board agreed, take the relationship between retailing and brand image to a new level. It would also ensure that consumers did not see Apple computers as merely a commodity product like Dell or Compaq.
Most outside experts disagreed. “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently,”
On May 19, 2001, the first Apple store opened in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, with gleaming white counters, bleached wood floors, and a huge “Think Different” poster of John and Yoko in bed. The skeptics were wrong. Gateway stores had been averaging 250 visitors a week. By 2004 Apple stores were averaging 5,400 per week. That year the stores had $1.2 billion in revenue, setting a record in the retail industry for reaching the billion-dollar milestone. Sales in each store were tabulated every four minutes by Ellison’s software, giving instant information on how to integrate manufacturing, supply, and sales channels.
As the stores flourished, Jobs stayed involved in every aspect. Lee Clow recalled, “In one of our marketing meetings just as the stores were opening, Steve made us spend a half hour deciding what hue of gray the restroom signs should be.” The architectural firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed the signature stores, but Jobs made all of the major decisions.
Jobs particularly focused on the staircases, which echoed the one he had built at NeXT. When he visited a store as it was being constructed, he invariably suggested changes to the staircase. His name is listed as the lead inventor on two patent applications on the staircases, one for the see-through look that features all-glass treads and glass supports melded together with titanium, the other for the engineering system that uses a monolithic unit of glass containing multiple glass sheets laminated together for supporting loads.
In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian—a concern that it’s hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic. The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence. “We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity,” said Johnson. “Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity.” So designers in Florence picked out just the right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its companion tiles. “Knowing that it’s the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time,” said Johnson.