KaDeWe, the century-old department store on Berlin’s Tauentzienstrasse, has opened a dedicated health hub inside the building. The floor pairs biohacking services with boutique fitness and a curated retail assortment.
Department stores have been searching for a reason to leave the house since online retail took the routine purchases. A treatment room cannot be shipped.
The assortment that surrounds the services is where the merchandising gets interesting, with recovery tools, supplements and technical textiles grouped by outcome rather than brand.
KaDeWe has been rebuilding its offer through a period of ownership change, and the health floor reads as a bet on footfall rather than margin per square metre.
Sceptics note that department stores have tried services before, from beauty counters to personal shopping, and that the economics only work at volume.
The health version has an advantage. Frequency of use is higher than for a dress, which gives the floor a reason to be revisited monthly instead of seasonally.
There is also a data argument. A customer booking a recovery session discloses preferences that a cosmetics counter would take years to infer.
