Geek culture is now mainstream culture.
While comic book stores aren't what they used to be -- if you can even find one in your city -- geek culture and all things related, including video games and collectibles, is more popular than ever.
Proof: ThinkGeek, the go-to place for all things geeky (this editor is partial to its seemingly useless gadgets) opened its fourth U.S. retail store in New York City Friday.
The 25-year-old company (yeah...it's old), which is a subsidiary of video game retailer GameStop, also has stores in Orlando, Florida; West Nyack, New York; and Hurst, Texas. ThinkGeek plans to have 25 more stores in the U.S. by the end of the year to capitalize on the rapidly-growing geek community looking to get their hands on merchandise.
Mashable attended the New York City store's opening located on 33rd street and Broadway (inside of the GameStop) and the store is most-definitely filled with a lot of fan merch.
From Star Wars t-shirts to Game of Thrones replica helmets to Nintendo plushes to Harry Potter mugs to Minecraft trinkets, the store has something for every geek. Nobody really needs a Game Boy carry-on spinner or an R2-D2 pizza slicer or Pikachu suspenders, but ThinkGeek has it.
As fans who queued around the block flooded the 1,200-square-foot lower-level store-within-a-store, we got the sense that these ThinkGeek stores could become more than just a place to shop. Like comic book stores before, they have the potential to become spaces for fans to congregate at and share their passions.
"We did roughly $300 million in sales last year in "loot" (what the company calls its collectible category) in the GameStop stores," Danny Gates, senior director of sales and operations for ThinkGeek, told Mashable. "We're in over 4,000 GameStop stores with a limited amount of loot. We also have a store-in-store platform -- [they are] very, very successful."
"We're looking to do over half a billion in sales this year in the loot category. So we're seeing exponential growth. As a matter of fact, it's one our largest growing categories in the GameStop stores and now obviously with ThinkGeek, we're leveraging all that experience very successfully."
We took a full tour of the New York City store and the merchandise available for purchase and one thing stood out as odd: There weren't any products that ThinkGeek is typically known for. You know, products like the silly Airzooka Air Gun, creepy USB Squirming Tentacle flash drive and weird Yeti USB Headed Plush Footwarmers.
When asked about it, Gates offered a reasonable (but expected) answer: space.
With all brick-and-mortar stores, there's limited shelf space. Naturally, ThinkGeek's stores are using all of the shopping data it has from its online store to decide what it should stock in its physical shops.
"When you think of the SKU (stock keeping unit) number on ThinkGeek.com, it's over 20,000 SKUs," Gates told Mashable. "Clearly we can't carry 20,000 SKUs [in stores], so what we do is we take a lot of the data from ThinkGeek.com and look at the top movers. What are the top moving products that people are really excited about? What are your customers telling you? And those are the SKUs we're putting in the ThinkGeek stores."
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That's not to say ThinkGeek will ignore those weirder products.
"What's unique about us is that you can walk into our stores and you can touch and you can feel the product."
Far from it. "For our future, we're going to continue to learn and really leverage ThinkGeek and expand [the product selection]. There's folks who are looking for those quirky office gag products -- those types of things -- and you're going to continue to see an evolution in our product [offerings] to make sure we have the right products for our customers."
"What's unique about us is that you can walk into our stores and you can touch and you can feel the product," Gates said. "And more importantly, we have fanatical employees. We're leveraging that human capital, which you're not going to get on Amazon or some of the other retailers. We have individuals that absolutely know the product forwards and backwards and are going to be able to put that product in your hands."
The most telling information might be that geeks aren't split by age or gender as much as mainstream media makes it out to be.
"Our age range is really, really broad. One of the things we see that is super cool and special is our female customers outpace our male customers, and that's really interesting."
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