CONCEPT STORE – A CREATIVE TWIST IN PHYSICAL RETAILING - A study about the entrepreneurial values and the lifecycle of concept stores in the Netherlands

The changing of the retail landscape and market uncertainty has challenged the traditional retail business, but the rise of the experience economy, as well as the creative industry, has offered new opportunities to creative entrepreneurs (Warde, 2015, 2017; Pine and Gilmore, 1999). The concept store as a creative physical retail business has emerged globally, against the online shopping trend despite the market uncertainty. The gap in academic research on concept store business practices is yet to be filled. Therefore, this thesis is dedicated to understanding the concept store as a cultural entrepreneurial practice by finding out how entrepreneurial preferences and values affect the lifecycle of concept stores. With a group of crucial literature on consumption changes and cultural entrepreneurship as the research foundation, a qualitative empirical study, which consists of 10 interviews with concept store owners and managers in the Netherlands, was carried out. The findings of this research present a new definition and typology of concept stores, as well as the connection between different value preferences and business decisions made in concept store lifecycles.