LOS ANGELES—Verizon Wireless has announced its first destination store on the West Coast in Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. Opening this summer, the interactive retail store is only the fifth store of its kind in the nation. Complete with several interactive “zones,” the store is founded on the customer's lifestyle experience and designed to promote retail traffic.

“The customer experience was really our biggest inspiration for the store,” Cherryanne Angoy, destination store manager at Verizon Wireless, tells GlobeSt.com. “The destination store really puts our wireless customers' lifestyles front and center, and engages them in ways that align with their interests. Santa Monica is really the perfect place for this experience. It is great for our local Southern California customer base and this is where Silicon Beach is as well, so it is home to emerging tech businesses. Our store is a great example of the increasing and really significant growth in technology here in Los Angeles. At the same time, Third Street Promenade brings in a lot of tourists and allows us to cater to our customers outside of Southern California.”

The 7,699-square-foot store is located in a historic building on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, and is an interactive playroom with different zones, including a business zone and an amplify zone. Angoy adds that the store also features a get-fit zone, with an interactive soccer display; an NFL reality experience, which puts you in the middle of a football field through virtual technology and is exclusive to the Santa Monica location; and a customize-it zone, where you can take a picture and create custom phone cases.

With the advent of ecommerce, retail experts have been long talking about the importance of creating an “in-store experience” to drive customers and therefore revenues in brick-and-mortar locations. Angoy explains that Verizon is doing just that by “putting the customer experience first and combining that with the Verizon products and the 4G LTE network,” which she says covers approximately 98% of Americans.

With more and more companies joining this trend, several brokerage firms have amped up their retail brokerage platforms. Earlier this month, JLL acquired the Wilson Retail Group to focus on retail in the Southwest region; while Avison Young announced a strategic new hire that will amp up their presence in Los Angeles.