page_title: Apple Store
section_title: Imitations
hierarchical_section_title: Apple Store / Imitations
caption_attribution_description: English: A unofficial Apple Store in Tehran, Iran
context_page_description: Apple Store is a chain of retail stores owned and operated by Apple Inc. The stores sell various Apple products, including Mac personal computers, iPhone smartphones, iPad tablet computers, iPod portable media players, Apple Watch smartwatches, Apple TV digital media players, software, and selected third-party accessories.
  The first Apple Stores were originally opened as two locations in May 2001 by then-CEO Steve Jobs, after years of attempting but failing store-within-a-store concepts. Seeing a need for improved retail presentation of the company's products, he began an effort in 1997 to revamp the retail program to get an improved relationship with consumers and hired Ron Johnson in 2000. Jobs relaunched Apple's online store in 1997 and opened the first two physical stores in 2001. The media initially speculated that Apple would fail, but its stores were highly successful, by passing the sales numbers of competing for nearby stores and within three years reached US$1 billion in annual sales, becoming the fastest retailer in history to do so.
context_section_description: In July 2011, an American expatriate blogger who lives in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming reported on her discovery of what she called "the best ripoff store we had ever seen"—a fake Apple Store, complete with the glass exterior, wood display tables, winding staircase and large promotional posters found in legitimate Apple Stores, and with employees wearing lanyards and the same T-shirts as actual Apple Store employees. The Wall Street Journal reported that the store had "gotten widespread international attention for the remarkable lengths to which its proprietors seem to have gone to mimic the look and feel of a real Apple Store." The fake Apple Store was mentioned by U.S. presidential contender Mitt Romney in the second 2012 election debate. Chinese law prohibits retailers from copying the look and feel of competitors' stores, but enforcement is lax.
  According to The Wall Street Journal, unauthorized Apple resellers are found throughout China; the blogger's original post noted that two such stores were located within walking distance of the first knockoff, one of them with a misspelled sign reading "Apple Stoer". An employee of the first knockoff confirmed that the store was not one of the 13 authorized Apple resellers in Kunming. In a follow-up report, Reuters indicated that local authorities in Kunming had closed two fake Apple Stores in that city due to lack of official business permits, but allowed three other such stores to stay open, including the one that had attracted international attention. The operators of that store had applied for a reseller license from Apple. At the time of the report, only four legitimate Apple Stores had opened in China, with two in Beijing and two in Shanghai.
caption: An unauthorized Apple Store in Tehran, Iran
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