Apple Watch chasing luxury consumers with fancy Paris booths and upgrades to retail stores

This has been a frenzied week for revelations about the Apple Watch, the much-hyped new product that nevertheless is still shrouded in a fair bit of mystery.

The latest news to drop is that Apple may be building some Apple Watch booths in an exclusive luxury shop in Paris. That tantalizing news comes from a French fashion magazine. The magazine reports that in the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann, it has spotted white tarps draped over four balconies. Click through this link to see pictures of the tarps.

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What does the Galeries Lafayette look like? You know, it’s pretty much your average dollar-store type situation:

In other words, not a place where you’re going to see ads about someone smashing a video of Big Brother to liberate technology for the masses.

Meanwhile, 9to5mac.com reports that Apple may be considering building its own separate stores to sell the Apple Watch. In addition, 9to5mac.com says Apple is adding safes inside the stores to protect the pricier version of the watch, which some have speculated could cost up to $20,000, a price tag that would likely cause many people’s heads to explode in shock.

We learned earlier this week, from the gargantuan New Yorker profile of Jony Ive, just how acutely aware Apple is of the need to cater to the particular whims of the types of people who would drop $20K for a gold watch that would let them send emojis to their BFFs:

“Ive has begun to work with [Angela] Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign — as yet unannounced — of the Apple Stores. These new spaces will surely become a more natural setting for vitrines filled with gold (and perhaps less welcoming, at least in some corners, to tourists and truants). Apple had not, overnight, become an élite-oriented company — and it would sell seventy-five million iPhones in the final quarter of 2014, many of them in China — but I wondered how rational, and pure of purpose, one can make the design of a V.I.P. area. Ive later told me that he had overheard someone saying, ‘I’m not going to buy a watch if I can’t stand on carpet.'”

And it also better be an 18th-century Persian rug, not just some carpet square from Target!

No word on whether Apple retail employees will also have to start wearing tuxedos and address everyone as “ma’am” or “sir” using Queen’s English accents as they serve tea and hold customer’s Chihuahuas while the elite try on the pricey timepieces.

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