From Clicks to Bricks: Is a brick and mortar store the next step for an online brand?

This bachelor's thesis examines conditions under which the expansion of an e-commerce sneaker reselling business into a physical brick-and-mortar store represents a financially viable decision. The thesis is divided into two main parts, where the first theoretical part describes concepts that are related to e-commerce and key concepts that are relevant for the research. It includes theoretical models such as PESTEL, Porter's Five Forces, SWOT, break-even analysis, and retail location theory that are applied to evaluate the expansion opportunity. A survey that questioned the target audience of SneakySneakers about their preferences while shopping for new sneakers was conducted, and gained 54 respondents. The second part of the thesis is practical and applies the concepts for the evaluation of the current operations of SneakySneakers and the potential requirements for the opening of a brick-and-mortar store. SneakySneakers is operating a hybrid model that combines direct sneaker reselling with consignment selling. The website has generated a revenue of 2.2 million Kč in the year 2025; however, it ended with a negative operational profit due to increased customer acquisition costs through paid advertising. The conclusion indicates that opening a physical store is not currently the optimal strategy due to negative operational profitability.