Your customers need time to think and get their bearings.
According to Andy Barlow, managing director of Manchester-based design consultancy Rawfish, helping customers understand your offer starts from the moment they step inside the door.
Rawfish worked on creating the interior of independent fashion store Choice in the Bluewater shopping centre and Barlow says that a wide entrance gives shoppers a ‘threshold point’ that allows them time to consider the in-store direction they might wish to take. Once you’ve got them inside the store, it becomes a matter of ‘circulation’ – the route that a shopper is going to take on the journey around a store.
In Choice, Rawfish created a complex ‘two-layer’ store with a raised level around the perimeter of the store, for more upmarket merchandise, and a ‘noisier’ lower level, home to more causal clothing. Given this unusual interior, it was essential that shoppers should be able to find their way around almost instinctively, guided by the store layout as much as by signage and way-finding devices.
To get customers up to the upper level, ramps were installed either side of the entrance, in effect funnelling shoppers in this direction and taking them on a trip behind the shop windows. This ended with a ‘knuckle’ where they were forced to change direction. Because the upper level was intended to serve as a vehicle for ‘premium’ labels such as Prada, Gucci and Jil Sander, carpeted ‘bays’, with their own mirror and ceiling, were created for each brand to promote a sense of exclusivity.
The underlying aim was to slow things down. Shoppers looking to buy an item of designer clothing need time, space and less noise than you might encounter in other shops – all features of the upper level in Choice. Although there were fitting rooms at various points throughout the store, the largest bank of them was on the upper level, again in keeping with the more considered nature of the purchase.
On the lower, more casual level in the store, the pace was designed to be faster and the layout of equipment was therefore less prescriptive. Here, the shopper was given the sense of a rather more random floorplan; intended to allow a measure of wandering and discovery.
On both levels, footwear was placed towards the back of the shop, but readily visible from the front. Barlow says that this was intended to draw shoppers through the whole of the shop, encouraging the possibility of impulse purchases along the way, from other departments.
It’s also worth noting the positioning of the cash desks. These were made of granite and located in the centre of the store with two till points in each side. Like the footwear departments, as a key feature, from a customer perspective, these were placed in a central location in the shop, helping to give the greatest possible visual clarity.
Although layout is different from wayfinding, it does have broad similarities. In the best-designed shops, the location of equipment and layout of merchandise should be capable of acting as wayfinding devices in their own right.