Boston Days - Part 16

Fifty Dollars. Eighteen Hours. One Swedish Brand.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a last-minute airport purchase revealed about the enormous, and largely unmade, opportunity that Travel Retail holds for brands worldwide.)

Not every retail discovery is planned. Some are born of desperation.

Over a fortnight in Boston — strenuous, stimulating, sleepless. Settled into the departure waiting area before my Emirates flight home — fourteen hours to Dubai, four more to Chennai — I reached for my Huawei earpiece. 

One of the soft ear buds of my Huawei was gone! Security checkpoint, most likely. One ear of silence is inconvenience enough for an eighteen-hour journey. I was far too tired to retrace my steps.

I walked into InMotion — the largest airport-based electronics retailer in the United States, with over 120 stores across 62 airports, owned by retail giant WHSmith. 

Apple, Bose, Sony, JBL, Beats, Sennheiser — all gleaming under focused track lighting, all projecting the confidence of brands that know their channel. 

A prominent Bose display ran a "Save USD 50" offer; even at the promoted price, nothing came under USD 130. The associate was absorbed in Reels — thumbing through short videos, fully committed to the feed. 

When I asked her which SKUs were on promotion, she glanced up with visible reluctance, pocketed her phone with some effort, and delivered a walkthrough that felt more like obligation than service. I walked out unconvinced.

The first Hudson Newsstand nearby was visibly shutting down — lights dimming, staff pulling stock, the energy of a place already closed in spirit. 

"Aren't you supposed to be open 24 hours — this being an international airport?" The young man had no real answer neither an intention to reply. Data point number two on customer service excellence. I moved on.

The second Hudson, barely a hundred metres away — two stores within a stone's throw of each other, a curiosity I am saving for another article — had a wider selection. Familiar brands under USD 50. 

And then a name I didn't recognise. Sudio. I stopped. A quick search told me enough. 

Founded in Stockholm in 2012 by engineers and music enthusiasts. Present across 16,000 stores globally — with confirmed travel retail presence in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and at Malaysia's KLIA2 via Heinemann Asia Pacific, alongside in-flight partnerships with SAS Group. 

The A3 Pro sat at USD 50: Active Noise Cancellation, Bluetooth 5.4, IPX4 splash resistance, metallic accents in a palette that whispered rather than shouted. For a brand built by engineers with an audiophile's DNA, worth every dollar of the bet.

What also caught my eye was the Sudio Flyg — a compact Bluetooth transmitter that connects wireless earbuds directly to a seat's 3.5mm in-flight entertainment jack, including dual-jack aircraft systems. Up to twelve hours of battery. Around USD 30. Elegant, specific, and overdue.

Fifty dollars and fifteen minutes later, I was listening to music. Sudio carried me through the next eighteen hours without a complaint.

A Swedish brand. Made in China. Discovered at a major American gateway airport. By an Indian heading home. That is the full circle Travel Retail makes possible.

And yet — Sudio, I learnt, is absent from most major European hubs. 

In China, dominant local brands make meaningful entry near-impossible. In India, the brand has no official presence at all. 

I had always thought the neglect of Travel Retail was an Indian problem. That evening in Boston, I understood it is a worldwide one. The brands still leaving this channel under-served are leaving their very best introductions unmade.

Boston was once again teaching me. Thank you, Boston!

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13 and Part 14here.

Boston Days — Part 15

The Robot Brewed It. But Did It Mean It?

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a frappe in downtown Boston and a robotic kiosk at Logan Airport taught me about the one thing no machine has yet learned to deliver — the soul behind a brand.)

A coffee chain that is struggling to get back at its feet. And a coffee making robot. Stark tale of 2 coffee offerings.

At downtown Boston, I paid my retail pilgrimage to the SBUX outlet at Assembly Row. Barista Ms. Anita was empathetic to my ask — any food item without eggs. And no, they don't have any.

She went on to prepare a wonderful frappe for me. Great drink for the soul, some rest for my feet before I continued my retail walk.

Assembly Row in Somerville is one of Boston's most compelling mixed-use destinations — open, walkable, anchored by brands that belong. Starbucks fits in naturally.

Founded in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks today operates over 36,000 stores across 80 countries. 

Yet the chain has endured a turbulent few years — leadership churn, flat same-store sales, and a high-profile CEO transition that brought in Brian Niccol from Chipotle in 2024 to engineer a turnaround. 

The comeback story is still being written.

What Ms. Anita delivered, though, was the Starbucks I recognise — warm, personal, unhurried. She read the customer, filled the gap, made it count.

Cut to Boston Airport on my return leg to India.

At Terminal E of Logan International, tucked past the departure boards and the duty-free frenzy, stood Mt. Comfort Coffee — a beautifully branded, self-contained automated pod, adorned with hand-drawn wilderness illustrations and a glowing LED outline, a robotic arm working silently at its centre.

Order placed on a touchscreen. Coffee delivered by the arm. No human in sight.

I stood and watched. Hardly anyone else stopped to do the same.

A few gates away, George Howell Coffee held its ground — a well-regarded Boston craft brand, known for sourcing discipline and specialty blends, with a proper counter and a considered menu. History, provenance, and craft in one place. Few takers, still.

No Starbucks at Terminal E. Two alternatives — one human-less, one storied — and neither drawing queues.

I found myself sitting with a question I could not answer:

If a robot can brew a technically excellent cup of coffee — does the experience, let alone the beverage, still stay true to the brand promise?

Ms. Anita made a great frappe.

The robot, I am told, makes a great cold brew.

But only one of them asked how my day was going.

Boston was teaching me. Again.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13 and Part 14 here.

Boston Days — Part 14

Own Your Moment. The Sunglass Hut Lesson.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a 450 sq ft store in downtown Boston taught me about drawing in a customer who had absolutely no intention of buying — and keeping them anyway.)

Not every customer who walks into a store is there to buy. Some are curious. Some are browsing. Some — like me on that particular Saturday afternoon — are there to observe, with a very specific lens. Pun intended.

I walked into the Sunglass Hut store in downtown Boston wearing every signal of non-buyer: a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses already on my face, a backpack on both shoulders, layered clothing, and that unhurried pace that translates, in every retail language, to not shopping today.

The store was compact — roughly 450 square feet. 

Yet hundreds of premium eyewear frames lined every wall in structured, luminous display. Dark fixtures, precise spacing, dedicated zones for Ray-Ban, Oakley, Armani Exchange, Burberry, Coach and Ralph Lauren — curated, not crowded.

What held me was not the collection. It was the consistency. 

Sunglass Hut looks exactly the same whether you walk in on a highstreet or through an airport terminal — Mumbai to Boston, Bangalore to beyond. The identity never wavers.

Founded in 1971 by Sanford Ziff as a single kiosk at Miami's Dadeland Mall, Sunglass Hut today operates over 3,000 stores across 20 countries. 

It is part of EssilorLuxottica — the French-Italian eyewear conglomerate formed through the 2018 merger of Essilor and Luxottica, led by CEO Francesco Milleri — which also owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, and a portfolio of luxury brand licences. 

Key competitors include Maui Jim, Specsavers, and in India, Lenskart and Vision Express.

The lone associate on the floor read me immediately — typical Indian traveller, backpack, casual stroll, mostly browse, wear, take pictures, move on — and attended to the other customers first. 

When the floor cleared, he walked over. Warm, unhurried, completely genuine. Seven to eight minutes of easy conversation followed. No pitch. No pressure.

When I put back a lens-cleaning liquid after noting its price, he delivered his line with quiet confidence: "Buy it once. Free refills for life at any Sunglass Hut store worldwide.".

Seriously?

I am not certain that offer holds at Sunglass Hut India — though it likely applies where the brand maintains a direct presence. Worth checking the next time you walk in 

But the lesson is not about the liquid.

Specialty retail at its very best draws you in on a different pretext entirely — curiosity, comparison, wandering — and then, with product knowledge and one perfectly timed line, quietly captures your attention, your wallet, and eventually, your loyalty.

Boston was teaching me. Again.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12 and Part 13 here.

Boston Days - Part 12

Leg Godt: How a 94-Year-Old Toy Company Out-Engaged the Smartphone

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a Harvard classroom, a LEGO store in downtown Boston, and one small race car taught me about customer engagement and repeat business.)

Footfall is rented. Engagement is owned. That is the only difference between a store you visit once and a brand you return to for life.

I had waited forty years for one walk into a LEGO store — to build something with my own hands beside other children, browse every shelf without an agenda, and spend a modest, self-imposed budget down to its last dollar. 

Small ambitions, held for a very long time.

I understood why that wait mattered inside a Harvard classroom, months before Boston. Early on during my Senior Leadership Program, we studied LEGO's turnaround as a case in discipline. 

Founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Denmark, the company took its name from "leg godt" — play well. 

The interlocking brick arrived in 1958, the minifigure in 1978. Then came theme parks, video games, and licensing deals that nearly buried it — $800 million in debt by 2003. 

A new CEO cut thousands of products, sold the parks, and rebuilt around the brick. 

By 2015, LEGO had overtaken Mattel and Hasbro to become the world's most valuable toy company — still earning over $9 billion a year, as newborns now inherit smartphones before toys.

That paradox pulled me into the LEGO Store in downtown Boston. 

A three-storey brick giraffe named Gio guards the corner, stopping strangers before they step inside — engagement earned on a public sidewalk, for free. 

Inside, a wall traces the company's history, ending on its founding motto: only the best is good enough. 

Nearby sat a bin of loose bricks, no set, no instructions, where I built beside a teenager, a toddler, and a father, united by nothing but the bricks. 

A sign above read "Adults Welcome," and I took that personally.

I browsed every wall, each merchandised as a complete idea, then bought the one thing that mattered — a small LEGO Formula One race car, a nod to three decades watching the sport, and a deliberate choice of Team LEGO over any real one. 

Twenty dollars, two hundred and one pieces, one evening of building I still remember.

A smartphone holds a child's attention for an hour. It cannot hand a stranger a brick and watch two generations finish something together. 

That difference is why LEGO still outsells every screen, ninety-four years on.

Retailers spend fortunes chasing footfall and forget that footfall without engagement never returns. 

LEGO stopped chasing new customers decades ago — it simply gave the ones it had a reason to return, never with a discount, always with a brick placed in the right hand.

Boston was teaching me again — that repeat business is never bought. It is built, one engaged customer at a time.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11 here.

Boston Days - Part 10

One Store. Two Concepts. A Retail Sangam at Assembly Row.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the art — and ambition — of co-locating two distinct retail concepts under a single roof.)

There is a phenomenon in nature — and in Indian languages there is a word for it: Sangam. The meeting of rivers. Where two bodies of water converge and yet retain their individual colours, their distinct character, before eventually merging into one. 

Rovers Bhagirathi and Alaknanda meet at Devprayag in the Himalayas — one clear and swift, one jade-green and fuller — visible as separate threads for a stretch before the river earns its most sacred name: River Ganga.

In Africa, the Blue Nile and the White Nile converge at Khartoum, Sudan, the difference in hue unmistakable even from a distance. In Germany, the Rhine and the Moselle meet at Koblenz — the Deutsches Eck — one dark, one lighter, side by side before yielding to each other.

A fellow pilgrim recommended it warmly. Assembly Row, Somerville. The combined TJ Maxx and HomeGoods store. Go, they said. You won't leave easily.

They were right. Wow was my first reaction.

The combined store spans approximately 45,000 square feet — TJ Maxx occupying roughly 28,000 and HomeGoods anchoring the balance. Large enough to disorient first-timers. Purposeful enough to reward the patient.

That is precisely how TJ Maxx and HomeGoods begin and end inside Assembly Row.

TJ Maxx was born in 1976 in Framingham, Massachusetts — an off-price apparel and fashion retailer under the larger TJX Companies umbrella. Today, TJX is a global behemoth with revenues of approximately $54 billion and over 4,900 stores across nine countries. 

TJ Maxx's differentiator is its treasure-hunt model — a curated mix of private labels, select international brands, and opportunistic buys, all at 20 to 60% below traditional retail. What struck me was the dominance of private labels, with a handful of recognisable international names sprinkled strategically through the aisles.

HomeGoods launched in 1992 — also a TJX creation, and a natural evolution of the same off-price philosophy applied to home furnishings, décor, and kitchenware. Its value proposition is sharp: global sourcing, constantly rotating assortment, and price points that make discretionary spending feel responsible. 

Similar concepts operating globally include Burlington in the US, JYSK across Europe, and Next Home in the UK — each anchoring the off-price home segment in their respective markets.

The customer synergies are obvious. The shopper who browses for a discounted jacket is frequently the same person who lingers over a ceramic lamp. The household wallet has multiple compartments — and this store is designed to open all of them in a single visit. 

Like a seasoned relay athlete passing the baton without breaking stride, TJ Maxx hands the customer seamlessly to HomeGoods at an invisible midpoint, the transition so organic it is barely felt.

Back in India, Big Bazaar attempted something similar — fashion and grocery under one roof. It was bold and prescient. But the mood states for clothing and groceries are fundamentally different. 

One is aspiration-driven; the other is need-driven. The shopper's mental wallet rarely visits both categories with equal enthusiasm in the same visit. Fewer takers initially, and eventually, structurally difficult to sustain.

Shoppers Stop and Home Stop represent a closer Indian analogy. Home Stop, a standalone home lifestyle format under the same K Raheja Corp umbrella, never shared a roof with Shoppers Stop to my knowledge — they remained separate standalone stores. 

Home Stop stores have been largely phased out in recent years, further validating how hard this adjacency is to execute profitably. If a combined format exists anywhere today, it is an exception worth investigating, not a pattern.

Three Insights. 

First, shared customer DNA is the strongest argument for co-location — not proximity of product categories. 

Second, the off-price model creates a treasure-hunt psychology that benefits enormously from size and variety, rewarding exploration across both concepts. 

Third, a seamless transition zone between the two concepts — visible but not jarring — is where the real design intelligence lives.

Four Strategies. 

One: anchor each concept with its own identity before inviting the overlap. 

Two: let value, not discount signage, do the emotional heavy lifting. 

Three: invest in sight lines — the HomeGoods world must be visible from deep inside TJ Maxx, creating curiosity. 

Four: train frontline staff to serve both concepts fluently, so the customer never feels handed off, only accompanied.

Five Lessons for Indian Retail Practitioners. 

One: customer synergy must be tested before store design is committed — survey before you sketch. 

Two: the off-price model requires sourcing sophistication that cannot be shortcut; it is a supply chain play first and a retail play second. 

Three: mood-state alignment matters more than category adjacency — Big Bazaar's challenge was mood, not merchandise. 

Four: size is a feature in this format, not a cost — undersizing kills the treasure-hunt. 

Five: in India, where organised retail is still maturing, the combined-concept model demands patience; the payoff is real, but the runway is longer than investors typically allow.

Assembly Row did not just show me two stores. It showed me what retail can be when two well-defined identities trust each other enough to share a roof.

Boston was teaching me. Again.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days — Part 9

The Store That Spoke to Me. After I Had Already Left.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers frontline culture — and what two factory outlets in Somerville taught me in ninety minutes.)

Assembly Row in Somerville is one of Greater Boston’s more interesting retail destinations. Open-air, mixed-use, genuinely alive on a warm August afternoon. I was there for two names: Nike and Puma.

Same street. Same concept. Ninety minutes between them. A very different education.

The Nike Factory Store is impossible to miss. 

Strong footfall. Unmistakable brand energy. Categories demarcated, range broad — everything that a factory outlet of the world’s largest sportswear brand should signal.

But something was off.

Merchandise was scattered. Shelves in various states of undress. Replenishment appeared to be an afterthought. Staff were few and visibly stretched. Customers were entirely on their own — not by design, simply by default.

The billing queue was long. Not the kind of long that means a great trading day. The kind that makes a motivated shopper quietly calculate whether waiting is worth it.

Footfall without conversion is noise. Brand strength got them through the door. What happened inside was another matter entirely.

Across the street stood the Puma Factory Store.

Fewer customers. Calmer energy. But immediately, noticeably different in composition. Staff were present — not just physically, but attending. The floor was managed. The store felt considered.

I spent over thirty minutes inside. Browsing, trying on, thinking. I stepped out without a purchase.

That is when it happened.

A Puma associate walked up — calmly, without rehearsed enthusiasm — and asked a simple question. Had I found what I was looking for?

It was an unremarkable interaction on the surface. Except it hadn’t happened inside Nike. And it happened here, after I had already left.

Someone had noticed that a person spent thirty minutes inside, walked out without buying, and was carrying unresolved intent. That is not a trained reflex. That is a culture.

A few kilometres away, inside an HBS classroom, I had spent an entire session the previous week discussing the Walmart case. 

Doug McMillon’s conviction — that Walmart’s greatest long-term competitive asset was its people — had generated sharp debate. His bets on frontline dignity and training were not HR policy. They were strategic capital allocation.

Standing on that Somerville sidewalk, I had just watched the same case play out. Not in a classroom. In real life.

One store had the crowd. The other had the conversation.

Ninety minutes at Assembly Row. No slides. 

No framework. Just one street, two stores, and a reminder that the greatest competitive advantage in retail has always been the person standing closest to the customer.

Boston was teaching me. Just not always inside a classroom.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.