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Step 1: Planning
Making a well thought out plan is a must for ensuring you create a successful display, with a cohesive and attractive design.
What are you trying to achieve?
What is the aim behind this display? Are you enticing customers in? Trying to highlight a new product? Or shift an old product?
Understanding your market is an important factor when you are thinking about the purpose of your display. What is likely to attract your audience? What kind of style in right for your market? Whereabouts in the store will be the most successful?
The purpose of your display needs to be your central building block for your planning.
Where
Once you know what you are trying to achieve, the next task is to plan where it’s going to go.
Is it: A window display? End-cap? Middle of the aisle?
And how does this fit within the flow and layout of your store? Do you want it in a high-foot traffic area? Or to draw customers into a part of your store? Are you trying to encourage last-minute by-the till impulse purchases?
We found a really insightful Store Layouts Guide in this article, which outlines the different options for directing the flow of traffic through your store and what suits different retailers more.
Whereabouts in your store’s layout will adding this display help achieve the goal you’ve chosen?
How
How will you achieve this goal? Think about:
Clear signage
Effective signage is an important tool for creating an engaging display. It can be used to grab your customer’s attention, inform them, reinforce your branding and tone, as well as, quite simply, clearly and efficiently giving them the price.
This is where point of sale items such as chalkboards and a-boards, posters, price display holders and stands, printed swing tags, sign clips or hanging posters become important tools.
Colours
Colours have a bigger impact than you’d think on people’s mood and perceptions.
Have you heard of colour theory?
A uniform pallet, or employing complimentary colours, helps to create a visually pleasing display and by employing colour theory, you can ensure it has the desired emotional impact.
Engage the senses
Scent
Some stores such as Lush and Hollister famously use scent to attract customers and create an experience that engages all the senses.
Visual
Colour and signage play into the visual experience, but you can also use different Store lighting techniques. According to this article ‘The Role of Lighting in Visual Merchandising’ the different types of lighting are characterised as:
Ambient Lighting: The effect of an overall illumination that doesn’t have a specific light source.
Accent Lighting: Draws attention to a specific item or display.
Task Lighting: Illuminates functional areas where specific tasks are performed.
Decorative Lighting: Aesthetic lighting such as chandeliers or pendant lights
Dynamic Lighting: Adaptable lighting that can change with the time of day, season or mood.
Touch
Play with textures, such as different woods, metals or material. You can also create displays that allow customers to touch the products to invoke their sense of touch
Adding dimension and depth
Use product display additions such as Display Stands, display boxes, baskets and trays, display pedestals, steps and blocks or display plinths to add height an depth to your display. There are many different visual merchandising techniques that involve staggering products at different heights to create shapes and visual effects for different outcomes.
Step 2: execution
Tell a story
Emotional selling can be an incredibly effective strategy for convincing someone to buy and way this can be achieved is through visual displays that tell a story.
For example a sports store looking to create inspiring sports displays, would use sports mannequins in dynamic poses to create action packed displays that evoked the feeling of playing the sport they are targeting.
Add focal points
Typically merchandised at eye level, focal points are either the centre of attention or involve a few stand-out pieces that catch attention and tie a visual display together.
This can involve quirky or unusual additions such as various display props like mannequins heads, arms and legs, seasonal decorations, floral elements or pet mannequins.
Merchandising techniques:
Rule of three: Commonly referred to in design as the rule of thirds, this proposes that items arranged in uneven numbers are more memorable and eye-catching, as it forces your eyes to move around more.
Horizontal merchandising: Arranging product horizontally, at the customers line of sight, which forces them to progress down the aisle.
Vertical merchandising: Arranging the products vertically, with the ones you want the customer to focus on the most in their line of sight. This allows them to see more products at once standing in one place.
Pyramid merchandising: Laying products out so that they make a triangular or pyramid shape as a way of directing focus.
Live merchandising: Creating a scene that mimics a real-life scenario
Hero merchandising: The whole display focuses on one product.
Within retail you have what’s called ‘one glance perception’, how much can be seen in one glance? Will you catch their attention in that one glance? What method best shows your products in that one glance?
Step 3: Maintenance
Keep the display clean!
So many stores will make beautiful displays that are dulled over time through dirt and dust. It may seem like a basic point but it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s important to keep a display as aesthetically pleasing as it started!
Regularly refresh
People’s eye’s start to skip over visuals that become familiar, so find ways to change up and refresh this display. Perhaps plan for product display items you can swap in to change the height or display a product a different way, whilst keeping to the overall vision.
Finally, start the whole thing again!
Part of the reason we call this ‘the exciting world of retail’ is because it is by nature always changing, so your visual merchandising and product display plans need to constantly change with it.
