Amazon Experience Centers are now open in Lennar model homes in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC with more coming soon. Customers can visit amazon.com/experience for more information and to find available homes to tour. Learn more about the Amazon Experience Centers in this new TechCrunch article by Ingrid Lunden.
Last week, we reported on how Amazon was leveraging a new relationship with home builder Lennar to expand its smart home business, specifically in the sale of home security services. Today, Amazon is taking the next step forward in that strategy: it’s launching a new chain of showrooms it’s calling the Amazon Experience Centers across Lennar model homes to demo and help sell its smart home devices, Amazon Dash Buttons, and other consumer electronics services such as streaming Prime Content with Fire TV.
The model homes will be fully connected up as Alexa-enabled smart homes, Amazon says, with customers able to walk through and see the full effect of being able to use Alexa to control all electronic and connected kit, from TVs and lights to thermostat and window blinds.
These Experience Centers will also become places where people can go to arrange for and order home services through Amazon Home Services, the company’s Thumbtack-style marketplace that lets people search for and book a range of in-home contractors for cleaning, fixing or helping in other ways.
The centers will open first in 15 model homes in the cities of Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC, and Amazon will be looking to strike deals with other home builders to replicate the model.
The Experience Centers, and the other work that Amazon is doing to provide a more in-person angle to its smart home strategy specifically is particularly important to the company’s smart home and consumer electronics strategy. If people are buying products to put into their homes, and many of those products represent the next generation of consumer electronics, it’s important for Amazon to provide more real-world touchpoints both to better sell and explain the services, and to help make consumers — the majority of whom will not be early adopters — more comfortable with the purchases.
