One museum. Two gift shops. Shop till you drop.
Both the Boeing Co. and the Future of Flight will operate gift shops at the new aviation center. Officials say they’ve been working together to make sure they offer products that complement, not compete with each other.
“There’s been a lot of idea-bouncing,” said Mike Wash, senior manager for Boeing Stores Inc. “It’s probably the most complementary, cooperative relationship I’ve been a part of.”
The new Boeing Store will be the first stop for visitors returning from the Boeing factory tour.
Boeing operates 18 retail stores nationwide, including a couple of employee-only outlets. The new Everett store at the Future of Flight will be unique – the only one open on Sundays.
At nearly 3,000 square feet, it will be almost 50 percent bigger than the Everett store Boeing now operates in a trailer that serves as the company’s tour center. The new store, Wash said, will have more room for merchandise and will be laid out on two levels so shoppers can move around it in a logical way.
The store will include museum-style exhibits and aviation-themed videos played on plasma screens that will be “just neat eye candy for people to look at” as they move through the store, Wash said. Shoppers will have just come back from viewing the factory, he said. “We wanted to maintain that excitement in our store.”
The Boeing Store at the museum will feature some special items only offered there, as well as some that sport both Boeing and Future of Flight brands, Wash said. The list will include hats, shirts and lanyards – those ubiquitous straps for carrying identification badges around one’s neck that are becoming a 21st-century fashion accessory.
And it will carry Boeing Store staples: hats, shirts, flight and bomber jackets, and airplane models, which will cover a big, eye-catching orange wall.
The new Boeing Store will “tell the story, and hopefully make some sales,” Wash said.
The Future of Flight store will be next door.
It’s smaller, at about 1,600 square feet, but it will offer merchandise and services that the Boeing Store won’t, said Barry Smith, the Future of Flight’s executive director.
The Future of Flight store will have a duty-free shop for international visitors, he said. It also will offer a foreign currency exchange.
The store will carry items made by Snohomish County companies that don’t have anything to do with aerospace – locally smoked salmon, for example, and processed fruit products.
And the Future of Flight store will be where people can come for printouts of the airplanes they design in the exhibit hall – and maybe get that design transferred onto a T-shirt.
This approach “gives us some way to marry up with (Boeing) in a complementary way,” Smith said.
The Boeing Store staffers have been helpful, he said.
“They’re good. They really know what they’re doing,” Smith said. “It’s nice to have some pros next door.”
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