Dive Brief:

• Bose announced Thursday that it will close all 119 retail stores in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia in the coming months, according to a company statement emailed to Retail Dive.
• Approximately 130 stores in Greater China and the United Arab Emirates will stay open, along with additional stores in India, Southeast Asia and South Korea, per the announcement.
• The company will offer severance and outplacement assistance to impacted employees, but declined to state the exact number of workers that will be affected.

Dive Insight:

Bose is pulling back on its global brick-and-mortar presence, stating that its noise-canceling headphones, wireless sport earbuds, portable speakers and smart speakers are "increasingly purchased through e-commerce." 

The company announcement comes on the heels of a massive year of store closures in the United States. Late last year, Coresight Research revealed that over 9,000 brick-and-mortar locations shuttered in 2019, up nearly 60% from the year prior.

"Originally, our retail stores gave people a way to experience, test, and talk to us about multi-component, CD and DVD-based home entertainment systems," Colette Burke, vice president of Bose's global sales, said in a statement. "At the time, it was a radical idea, but we focused on what our customers needed, and where they needed it — and we're doing the same thing now." 

Bose will maintain some of its stores scattered internationally, and will continue to sell products on its own website. The company also currently has a presence through third-party sellers including Best Buy — a retailer that also went through a period of shuttering some 100 locations in the past decade in order to right-size its fleet.