Nike's Biggest Retail Experiment (So Far)

Nike's latest retail experiment is a five story store that opened in mid-November in Manhattan's Soho area. It features space to completely customize products, a basketball court that can digitally analyze your form, and plenty of other new product features.

The store is a signal about how Nike sees the role of its stores: as a conduit to personalize and deliver products to people much more quickly.

Retail square footage used to be a measure of how much stock you could put in front of someone. Increasingly it is a measure of what you can do for someone that a website cannot, and a basketball court that watches how you shoot is a fairly convincing answer to that question.