For the Washington DC-based media and travel brand it is clearly a departure as it moves - helped by its Spanish partner Worldwide Retail Store - into the arena of physical retail.
After a few false starts and having spent, it is thought, close to£6 million on getting the three-floor, 19,375 sq ft (1,800 sq m) project off the ground, it is little wonder that Worldwide Retail Store chief executive Pere Matamales was “emotional” (his words) as the doors opened last Friday.
But there is rather more to this particular retail christening than just another good looking store making its Regent Street debut. A quick scoot up and down London's most imposing and architecturally uniform street reveals that there is only really one more shop of any significance left to open: the Ferrari shop, which is considerably smaller.
The National Geographic store, therefore, is just about the last major shop that will open in Regent Street for the foreseeable future. And with Nokia, a remodelled Hamleys and Banana Republic, among others, all having reached fruition during 2008, we might look back on this year as a golden one for the West End.
It is, of course, equally possible that we might not. The amount of money that has been pumped into this single street makes it the kind of place on which many retailers have pinned their hopes.
And there are two ways of looking at this. Retail pundits will tell you that Regent Street is a thoroughfare filled with brand flagships where having a presence is rather more important than making money. This may be so, but in recessionary times the tendency to let the eye stray towards the bottom line is more tempting than last year.
On this reckoning, the National Geographic store might not be retail's last hurrah, but it could mark the end of a chapter that has brought many fine looking store environments from the Regent Street pipeline.
Indeed, Regent Street looks, for the moment, like a microcosm of the broader retail development sector. In the past three weeks, we've seen Westfield bring us a host of new formats in a development that is likely to be the last of its kind for some time.
The same is true of National Geographic. It stands, more or less, as the finishing touch to Crown Estate's project Regent Street.
Look, see and admire. Regent Street and Westfield are complete and their like won't be seen again. At least not for a while.
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