You won't find a video tunnel or a giant shoe vending machine in your typical shoe store. But the new DSW on the Las Vegas Strip is far from typical.
The Columbus, Ohio-based footwear and accessories retailer has opened the new store in the Showcase mall, basing some of its innovations on the company's hometown lab store.
While the Las Vegas store is half the size of a typical DSW, it has a full assortment of brand name and designer shoes and accessories.
And it's got the kind of pizazz that one would expect in Las Vegas.
The show begins at the front door, as customers are drawn from the Strip into the store through a video-covered passageway, giving the feel of being inside the visual display.
"Our 'video tunnel' is an immersive and exciting feature that makes customers feel as if they're flying over a city, swimming under water, or walking through a desert," said DSW CEO Roger Rawlins in a statement. "In reality, they're traveling down an escalator into the new DSW sales floor, where more unique experiences await."
One of those experiences is a one-of-a-kind "Shoevator," or shoe elevator. The display wall of shoes includes three elevator lifts, serviced from a mezzanine over the sales floor. Customers order shoes from the wall via the DSW app or a tablet located at a nearby kiosk, which alerts an employee on the mezzanine. The employee receives the order, picks the ordered shoes and sends it to the sales floor in a numbered bin via the "Shoevator" where the customer picks it up.
"It's essentially a giant shoe vending machine," Rawlins said, "inspired by the assembly line-style mechanisms that we use to move product around our actual warehouse."
In a nod to its location in the nation's gambling capital, customers can also win a pair of sneakers by playing the Heat Vault Keymaster machine. Reminiscent of an arcade game, Heat Vault Keymaster players try to retrieve sneakers in just two moves by inserting a key into a keyhole using a joystick.