Dive Brief:

• Nike is working to give its stores local flavor, imbuing them with images and items gleaned from local sports teams, artists, and designers, the Washington Post reports.

• At a Nike Factory Store in Tuscaloosa, AL, for example, a store wall boasts the “Roll, tide, roll” chant of the University of Alabama. And a Brooklyn store in Flatbush features photos of the neighborhood and local athletes by a local photographer. In East Los Angeles, local high school banners decorate the store.

• Kohl’s, Target, and other national retail chains are making similar moves, bringing local merchandise and designs into stores. 

Dive Insight:

Bringing local flavor to stores is a powerful way to cut through the sameness of chains and take advantage of what brick-and-mortar can offer compared to online sites. And it’s a way to tap into the “buy local” movement especially popular among millennials. 

“From the moment you approach the door, you start to get that contextual feeling of where you are,” Christiana Shi, Nike’s president of direct-to-consumer, told the Post.

Data helps let national chains know what items might sell well locally and what kinds of campaigns might appeal to those who frequent their stores in a given area.

“All these national retailers with thousands of stores coast-to-coast realized that they were missing business at the same time the technology was improving to let them learn what customers wanted,” Retailing In Focus head of consultancy Dick Seesel told the Post.

The idea of “buying local” can even lead people to opt to pay more, just to keep their dollars close by, according to Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

"There is this larger, cultural shift ... to buy local,” Mitchell told CNN. "Rather than pulling back and buying into the idea that they could save a few bucks elsewhere, in many communities, people seemed to make even more of an effort to steer their spending to businesses owned locally.”