• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, May 7, 2015

Enjoy, the brainchild of Apple Store mastermind Ron Johnson, is hitting the ground in the San Francisco Bay Area, Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn — you know where — with its specialized troops personally delivering high-tech products to customers and then spending an hour helping them get booted up and running at a location of their choosing.

“Enjoy was founded on the simple premise that people need help and we believe that a human connection is the best way to help them,” Johnson says in a news release that also announces AT&T as its “first integrated partner” and stocked brands such as HP, GoPro, Sonos, Specialized Bicycle and Lenovo. “With Enjoy, we’re delivering the first Personal Commerce platform, offering an entirely new way for customers to buy products and for employees, an entirely new way to work.”

The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo observes that “there are two ways for start-ups to take on Amazon”  — directly or obliquely, which is what he suggests Enjoy is attempting.

“Mr. Johnson began noodling around with the idea that would become Enjoy early in 2014, about a year after he was dumped from a disastrous run as chief executive of J.C. Penney,” Manjoo writes. “He became intrigued, he said, by the possibility of re-imagining Personal Setup, a service he created at Apple that offers free in-store assistance to people who buy new products.”

Marc Lore’s Jet.com, on the other hand, will attempt a frontal assault on Amazon with guaranteed lowest prices on select products for members of the fee-based e-com warehouse — a business model that Manjoo also explores in his piece this morning.

Prices at Enjoy, on the other hand, are “in line with competing retailers,” even with the personalized set-up, writes Cnet’s Don Reisinger.

“After a customer buys one of those products, he or she will determine when they'd like to have the product delivered,” Reisinger explains, and one of the Enjoy “Experts,” as they are called, will help them get it up and running. “In the case of the GoPro, that training includes creating, editing, and sharing the user's first movie,” he cites as an example.

The Experts are “all salaried employees of Enjoy, with full benefits and equity in the company,” according to the company’s release, and  “are given the freedom to work according to a schedule that fits their needs” through the company’s proprietary app.

Enjoy has produced two short videos — “How Enjoy Works” and “What Is An Enjoy Visit?” The second promotes another service it’s offering. If you’ve already purchased a gadget somewhere and can’t for the life of you figure out how to get it going, you can book an Expert for an hour for $99.

Johnson tells the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Bensinger and Daisuke Wakabayashi that Enjoy will make its profit “from the difference in wholesale prices it has negotiated and what customers pay” and that it “plans to only sell devices that are $200 or more, though customers can add cases or other accessories to a given order.”

“We’re living in an on-demand delivery world,” Johnson tells Bensinger and Wakabayashi. “We expect everything to come when and where we want. It’s time to reinvent how we buy things.”

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company currently has 127 Experts in San Francisco and NYC who will “[do] their rounds in a Uniqlo-provided uniform emblazoned with the Enjoy logo” after “hours of focus group discussions found that employees wearing uniforms to show they were serious about the job was the most frequent piece of feedback from those surveyed,” reports Davey Alba for Wired.

“Our product is a person — it’s an Enjoy expert — and we invest heavily in selecting people who would flourish in this position,” Johnson tells Alba while “balling up both fists and raising them up in the air while he talks, as if he’s cheering on an invisible team.” 

“The art of our product is a visit,” Johnson says.

“Our product is a visit and it's really hard,” Johnson elaborates in an interview with CNBC’s Courtney Reagan. “We've got to deliver a person and a product. We're always early, there's no delivery windows. We've got to deliver amazing personal help; it's not going to be easy. So our growth plan is very simple. It's one visit at a time. We're going to build this company one visit at a time.” 

Sounds just like a high-functioning CEO in the pink cloud of recovery after hitting bottom.