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On Saturday, MediaMarkt will open a shop in Antwerp that focuses entirely on sustainable urban mobility. With this European first, the retailer emphasises its ambition to become a service and experience company.
Experience and service
The new urban mobility store will offer a wide range of light electric vehicles, from electric scooters, e-skateboards and monowheels to electric city bikes and fatbikes on 200 square metres. Notable eye-catchers are e-steps under licence from brands such as Jeep, Ducati or Lamborghini. Shoppers will also find sustainable charging solutions, such as charging stations with portable solar panels, and accessories such as helmets, bags, locks and lights. There is also a repair and maintenance service.
This is a European test, COO Carsten Geilert expains. The retailer thinks it will reach new customers in a strongly growing market segment: “We already had some smaller store formats, such as smart stores and Xpress shops, but this concept is completely new for us. Here it is not just about the hard sales of products, we are becoming even more of an experience retailer and a service platform.”
Great potential
This mobility store is an idea from the Belgian team, Frederik De Vetter boasts. The regional director of MediaMarkt in Belgium says that the retailer has been successfully selling electric bikes and e-steps in its major stores for several years and saw potential to claim this market. Indeed, MediaMarkt already accounts for about half of e-scooter sales in Belgium, and its Antwerp stores realise a third of all e-mobility sales by the electronics chain in the country. A vacant location in the Antwerp Tower – which already houses a large branch of the chain on the first floor – offered a great opportunity.
Whether MediaMarkt wants to test this brand-new format in other cities? “We are going to fine-tune the concept here first, and if it proves a success we will definitely roll it out elsewhere”, Geilert points out. “We believe in it. It does depend on the local situation. Due to the strict regulation regarding e-steps, it would not make sense in the Netherlands, for example.”
