PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

Sony’s Metreon concept seems to be paying off

By Rick DelVecchio

Sony’s Metreon in San Francisco reported 6.2 million visitors after its first year.

SAN FRANCISCO — Metreon, Sony’s experimental retail and entertainment stage in the heart of San Francisco, never seemed in doubt as a state-of-the-art showcase. The question was: Would the cash follow the flash?

The answer, 13 months after the 350,000-square-foot complex opened, is a tentative yes.

The Japanese conglomerate projected 5 million visitors — “guests,’’ in company parlance — in Metreon’s first year. At the anniversary on June 16, it reported 6.2 million. Surveys taken in June 2000 and October 1999 showed that most visitors come from the San Francisco Bay Area, but 40% are tourists.

Although Sony does not release sales figures, it did not dispute an unscientific estimate of $80 million to $100 million a year, a range that would be reached if one in three guests paid $39 a visit and the rest just looked. With wages and salaries estimated at less than $20 million and property taxes and lease payments at less than $3 million, Metreon appears to be a highly profitable enterprise.

“All the shopping is doing very well,’’ spokeswoman Marlene Saritsky said.

Sony executives must think so, because they have exported the concept to Tokyo as Mediage. Sony has also opened a smaller urban entertainment center in Berlin, called Music Box.

A good location and a strong economy helped Metreon get off to a fast start. A former skid row redeveloped by the city, the neighborhood is ground zero for San Francisco’s convention trade, is close to the dot-coms of Multimedia Gulch and borders the rolling green of a new urban park called Yerba Buena Gardens. Metreon is situated in an area so as to capture tourists, celebrities, gamers and the lunchtime, after-school and evening movie and food crowds.

Some of Metreon’s major vendors say they had a strong opening year.

Operated by Loews Cineplex Entertainment of New York City, the 15-screen Sony Theatres Metreon is consistently among the chain’s top three venues.

“From the day we opened, it has been a winner,’’ said Linda Mariano, spokeswoman for Discovery Channel Store, a Metreon anchor. The Metreon store is one of two flagships for Discovery Channel’s retail arm, which is based in Berkeley, Calif.

The store targets families and enjoys throngs of browsers biding their time before seeing a movie. Customers are encouraged to interact with the merchandise, be it a rubber frog, a pebble of turquoise labeled as having healing powers, a tribal mask from New Guinea or night-vision goggles.

“We take the tag line of Discovery Channel, which is ‘explore your world,’ and let people experience that so the stores become a place where you can touch, feel and buy the Discovery experience,’’ Mariano said.

At Sony Style, a consumer technology showcase, visitors are also urged to play before they buy. And play they do.

“On a given day, one out of five are here to buy,’’ said Offert Kempff, a sales associate.

If that does not sound like much, consider that this is the San Francisco Bay Area, and there is no shortage of deep-pocket consumers eager to plunge for the latest technology as soon as it comes out, if not before. A few such clients go a long way.

“People will come in and buy a $20 Walkman,” Kempff said. “Then we have guests with a lot of discretionary income, who come in and say, ‘I want that, and that and that.’”

Sony says that another of its Metreon shops, PlayStation, sold almost 5,000 copies of the company’s computer games platform in the center’s first year.

But as an 84-hour-a-week interactive commercial for one of Sony’s most profitable lines, the store also functions to move goods indirectly. “Ambassadorship” for the brand is one of Metreon’s key roles, a sales associate said.

Try getting a stool at the counter where Sony offers 10-minute test-drives of any of 250 game titles, three of which were designed by Metreon’s in-house programmers. Show up on a Wednesday between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. if you don’t want to wait in line, a games bartender said.

On a recent afternoon, Ted Nagao, 17, a tourist from Pittsburgh, waited with his actual skateboard under his arm for a chance to play a virtual skateboarding game. Off in a corner, Michael Johnson, 10, who will enter the fifth grade this fall at a public school in nearby Oakland, sat on the floor and pumped away at the controls of another Sony game amid a crumple of his and his friends’ lunch bags from McDonald’s.

“The only thing I come here for is the games,’’ the youngster said.

Airtight Garage, an interactive games arcade, also appears to be a hit. Hyper Bowl, a virtual bowling game popular with locals, had 100,000 plays in Metreon’s first year, 70,000 more than expected, and Sony plans to add at least eight more lanes this year.

Metreon also houses the first Microsoft retail store. On two recent visits, the crowds were sparser than in the Sony stores. But stations offering free game plays were full, and a group of teen-age girls gathered around a computerized piano and half-shouted, half-sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Some reports have suggested that business is slow at Where the Wild Things Are, a store, restaurant and interactive amusement inspired by Maurice Sendak’s books, and at The Way Things Work — In Mammoth 3D. The Way Things Work serves up a movie and interactive exhibits that demonstrate the physics of everyday machines and has a companion store. In November, Sony changed the site to put more emphasis on hands-on education.

Metreon’s environment is in no way like that of a traditional mall. Stores are arranged not in rows but as a montage, set against a field of Sony black. Curved and angular and pulsing with light and sound, the space is highly sensory and mildly disorienting.

Signs, like buttons on a Sony gadget, are few and restrained. Human guides, though, are plentiful: concierges in tunics and other black-clad Sony workers drilled in the Metreon aesthetic of the shopping and entertainment center as “urban gathering place.’’

One is encouraged to lounge amid the products. On a recent afternoon in Sony Style, customers sat on a sofa, absorbed in the uncanny detail of “The Mark of Zorro’’ on a $16,000 plasma monitor. Another visitor viewed “Godzilla” on a laptop with a seven-inch screen. Two people in armchairs watched “Stuart Little’’ on monitors demonstrating rear projection — yet another technology.

But the selling is as serious as the staging. In one head-spinning encounter with a Sony Style sales associate, an expression of curiosity about a 53-inch rear projection TV moved in a flash to the verge of scheduling home delivery.

An interesting test would be how consumer confidence in the Sony Style model stacks up in comparison to shopping online or buying from an old-fashioned electronics vendor with a workbench in the back. The real challenge, a sales associate said, will be in the coming year when the novelty wears off.

Sony has a staff of 350 working to keep Metreon compelling, not including 650 employees who work for other tenants. They have had good luck booking special events, such as business meetings, product launch parties and employee appreciation days.

The programming mix also includes a gathering of owners of Sony’s $2,500 robot-dog luxury toy called AIBO, a charity auction of celebrity-designed computer mice and the opportunity to gun, if only for a few feet, the latest in hip urban transportation: a battery-operated scooter that does 15 miles an hour.

Metreon is better designed than the average mall and does a good job putting together interesting food purveyors, said Nina Gruen, principal sociologist for Gruen Gruen + Associates in San Francisco.

But Gruen observes that Metreon is “more for boys than for girls.

“The most successful aspects of the center are the movie theaters and the food court, and you’ve got a lot of tourists walking through, but to the extent they’re doing anything is not exactly clear,’’ she said. “I don’t think the story is entirely in on Metreon.”