An increasing number of e-tailers are putting down brick-and-mortar roots with “webrooms.” Most recently, online jewelry brand and WIRLC favorite BaubleBar announced it’s joined the likes of fellow formerly online-only brands Blue Nile, Bonobos, Warby Parker and Birchbox in opening a brick-and-mortar store. BaubleBar’s first storefront is in Long Island’s Roosevelt Field Mall.

“We have a very strong customer base in the tri-state area,” explained BaubleBar Co-Founder Amy Jain in this Forbes article on the company’s decision to enter the new channel of brick-and-mortar.

While the Long Island outpost marks BaubleBar’s first attempt at a solo venture into brick-and-mortar retail, the company has been testing offline sales since its founding. Pop-up stores and partnerships with larger retailers such as Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Anthropologie have given BaubleBar the opportunity to dip its toes into brick-and-mortar without fully immersing itself.

“We’ve been dabbling in offline concepts since we launched the business,” Jain said. “Fashion jewelry is a category that’s very early in terms of e-commerce. Our product is small and impulsive. We want to be wherever our girl is, whenever she wants to buy the product.”

Reverse Omnichannel
BaubleBar is the latest in a growing list of retailers to move from online to offline, the reverse of what many brands did in the early days of e-commerce. For example, earlier this year Blue Nile opened up its first storefront, also at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field Mall, offering one-on-one service for consumers picking out one-of-a-kind jewelry. Blue Nile likens its in-store shopping experience to Apple’s Genius bar.

Blue Nile CEO Harvey Kanter said that Blue Nile decided to place the store at the Roosevelt Field Mall because of a successful trial run it did there as part of its partnership with Nordstrom as well as the fact that Simon Property Group, the mall’s owner, is aggressively courting pure-play e-commerce retailers to establish storefronts.

“This is about learning and charting a road map,” said Kanter in a company press release. “We certainly didn’t open the store with the vision that it’s going to be the only one.”