Amazon to Close Its 2 Physical Clothing Stores

Amazon is closing its physical clothing stores as it shifts its focus to its online fashion shopping experience and expanding its grocery stores business.

The two Amazon Style stores, located in Glendale, California, and Columbus, Ohio, will be closed by Nov. 9, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Nov. 2).

Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish told the media outlet, “After careful consideration, we’ve decided to close our two Amazon Style physical retail stores and focus on our online fashion shopping experience.”

This move follows Amazon’s closure of most of its Amazon-branded physical stores last year, including bookstores, a variety mart and mall pop-up kiosks, according to the report. However, the company had proceeded with the first Style location, which opened in May 2022.

Despite the upcoming closure of the clothing stores, Amazon emphasizes the importance of physical retail to the company, the report said. It continues to invest in growing its grocery stores business, led by Tony Hoggett, a former Tesco executive. Hoggett is spearheading efforts to redesign Amazon Fresh-branded grocery stores and streamline the company’s online grocery franchises. Amazon plans to open new supermarkets in the future to expand its presence in the grocery sector.

In the third quarter, revenue for Amazon’s physical stores segment, primarily from Whole Foods Market locations, increased by 5.6% to $4.9 billion, per the report.

The two Amazon Style stores offer an app-based in-store shopping experience for men and women’s clothing and accessories, allowing customers to use their phones to scan QR codes as they shop the floor and choose between different colors, sizes and styles in the app. The selected items are then sent to a dressing room, a physical checkout or directly to a digital checkout.

Speaking of the company’s other brick-and-mortar offering, the Amazon Fresh grocery stores, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in April: “If you really want to serve as much of grocery as we’d like to, you have to have a mass physical offering, and that’s what we’ve been working on for a few years with the brand we’ve called Amazon Fresh. We wish we were further along at this point. We’ve tried lots of ideas. We haven’t yet found conviction around the format that we want to expand much more broadly.”