Ron Johnson helped create the idea of the Apple Store, a store where carefully trained and identically attired people guide you towards the purchase of your next digital gadget. Now, he wants to bring much the same thing into your home, your office, and maybe even your local coffee shop.
Today, Johnson's new company, Enjoy, launched what he calls "the world’s first personal commerce platform." Enjoy sells tech gadgets over the net, and when you buy one, an Enjoy employee will not only hand-deliver the product, but spend up to an hour teaching you how to use it. They'll do this pretty much anywhere you want to do it, including a park or a coffee shop. "People need help," says Johnson, who spent a decade as Apple's retail chief, before a less successful stint at fading retailer JC Penney, "and we want to deliver on tech’s complexities."
The service is available in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, along with parts of Brooklyn, and it offers everything from smartphones, tablets, and laptops to action cameras, e-bikes, electric skateboards, and drones.
With the service, Enjoy joins a long list of startups pushing towards an economy of instant gratification. These companies are offering web and smartphone services will instantly send you restaurant food, deliver groceries, and even do your laundry. Now you can get a gadget expert too.
When you make a purchase from the Enjoy website, you're led to a page where you can choose a delivery date and time, which doubles as your expert appointment. These visits are available from 8am to 8pm every day of the week, in one-hour increments, and you can choose a time up to two weeks in advance. If you want the gadget set up in your home immediately, Enjoy guarantees deliveries as soon as four hours from when you order. You can also purchase an Enjoy visit for tech you already own, or buy a visit for friends and family. That'll cost you $99.
The service is not meant to help people with broken gadgets, but rather, to help them do more with technology. If someone buys a Sonos music system, for instance, the Enjoy expert might set it up in multiple rooms of the customer’s house, then walk the customer through the different music streaming options available to them.
They might even suggest some apps and services the customer might want to take advantage of to discover how to enjoy local music in the neighborhood they live in. Meanwhile, if the product is a GoPro action camera, the aim would be to create, upload and share a customer’s first short film using the device. Someone who buys a drone might meet an Enjoy expert in a local park to learn how to control the flying robot.
"Our product is a person---it’s an Enjoy expert---and we invest heavily in selecting people who would flourish in this position," Johnson says, balling up both fists and raising them up in the air while he talks, as if he’s cheering on an invisible team. "The art of our product is a visit."
All Enjoy experts are on staff with the company. At Enjoy, every employee has a salary, benefits, and even an equity stake in the company. But they still get the flexibility of choosing their own work hours, as long as they commit to more or less 40 hours a week. Johnson says some of these hours can be spent in what he calls community-building efforts---say, holding workshops for multiple customers at a coffee house.
Today, the company employs 127 people in San Francisco and New York, and each Enjoy employee does their rounds in a Uniqlo-provided uniform emblazoned with the Enjoy logo. That was added for a veneer of credibility after the company conducted hours of focus group discussions and found that employees wearing uniforms to show they were serious about the job was the most frequent piece of feedback from those surveyed. On the website, products are always shown with an expert, Johnson says, and every expert featured in the videos is employed by the company.
In cities where it offers service, Enjoy runs small inventory warehouse, or "Enjoy houses." Johnson envisions these sites as places where workers can hang out when they're not working.
All the companies that offer products through Enjoy are paying the company for the right to do so. In return, Enjoy gives the companies feedback on common stumbling blocks in setting up their products. Additionally, Johnson says, there’s evidence that when a real person takes the time to walk a customer through using a product, the rate of return goes way down, and customers tend to grow more loyal to a brand. There are fewer calls placed to customer service as well, he says.
Partners include Sonos, Microsoft, GoPro, and AT&T. AT&T also plans on offering Enjoy services from its own website.
Johnson's track record is mixed. But none too surprisingly, he's optimistic about his latest venture. "When people look back on the beginning of e-commerce, they think Amazon," he says. “We hope one day someone will say: 'When I think of personal commerce, I think of Enjoy.'"
