Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A chain that started with stores, then went online and spun off a specialty brand that it now wants to bring back to the physical world, can steal the answers to some of those questions from its existing stores. But that’s not a perfect answer. The more generic a store looks and feels, the harder it is for customers to buy the idea that this is the same as the online experience.

A version of that problem has already burned Gap in the past. In 2008 it merged the backends of its four E-Commerce brands (at that time Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Piperlime) and allowed customers to jump easily from one site to another using the same shopping cart. That ended up diluting the online presences of all four brands, and customer satisfaction with the sites actually dropped.

Now Gap is trying to use the clicks-to-bricks success of Athleta as a template for Piperlime, and the chain is a little more aware of the pitfalls. The design goal for the Athleta stores was to satisfy customers who “really wanted the opportunity to physically experience the brand and try that product on because it’s so technical,” Gap CEO Murphy said. “And the customers, they really love the online experience and were inspired from the catalog, they really wanted a physical manifestation of the brand.”

That translated into store layouts that are designed for lots of special events, including a heavy schedule of workout classes and demonstrations at the dozen stores the chain currently has open. And that’s obviously not a perfect model for Piperlime, which is intended to be a single showcase store focused on shoes, handbags and apparel.

And whatever design decisions are made for the Piperlime stores may change the personality of the brand—that, in turn, will have to be fed back into the E-Commerce site to keep the personality consistent. The bigger the difference between how the site and the store feel, the more complicated that realignment will have to be.

Yes, there’s still a difference between channels, and there are still limits to what E-Commerce people have to worry about. But as brands move back and forth between stores and sites, you’d better expect those limits to get a lot more flexible. Those channels are getting closer all the time.