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Lace up your kicks: Champs Sports has opened a new experiential space. And at 35,000 square feet, the store—called Champs Sports Homefield—is the company’s biggest ever.
What’s inside? A regulation-size basketball court, for one. (Well, there’s a multi-sports court too.) Customers can also do a vertical jump and shuttle run to size up their athletic skills in a digital VR combine.
- Plus, there’s a health and wellness section that has everything from treadmills and stationary bikes to nutritional products from GNC.
The Pembroke Pines, Florida, store, more so than Champs’s typical locations, is meant to cater to the modern athlete—a key customer its parent company, Foot Locker, has zeroed in on since it merged Champs Sports and DTC brand Eastbay last year.
“What the environment brings together is all these elements in really one house, with the center of the house something really geared deeply [toward] and rooted in performance,” Guy Harkless, SVP and general manager of Champs Sports, told Retail Brew. “On the perimeter of the house, [we’re] thinking about all the things that are from a lifestyle standpoint.”
Team effort: Homefield is home to plenty of household names like Nike and Adidas. But Champs is also making more room for its own private labels and niche brands to its assortment, such as Brooks and Hoka, as more wholesale partners shift their attention to DTC.
“We do know that in a place like this, we do have the ability to tell even more stories and do them in a way that we know we can bring something just extra to the athlete that comes into our stores,” Harkless said. “That performance aspect really isn’t something that we’ve had a chance to do other than through the Eastbay business.”
+1: With Homefield, Champs is all-in on experiential—which we’ve previously highlighted as a key element of store design today. Click here to read why retailers are striving to make shopping more memorable than transactional.—KM