If your store layout’s fine, your customers can find what they want, but there’s still something missing, there are a number of tricks you can try.
One of the UK’s more successful small niche retailers is The White Company. The clue is in the name. This is a small, but growing, chain of shops where the customer offer is based on selling homewares stock that is white, or at most, off-white.
With this kind of colouring, or lack of it, there is a very real danger that things might look a little bland or equally that shoppers might overlook it altogether. In an attempt to avoid this, The White Company called in the consultants in the shape of Caulder Moore, the Kew-based practice that, as well as other things, has a string of small store interior credits to its name.
Irene Maguire, director at Caulder Moore, says that one of the things they did for The White Company was to impose a sense of order.
‘The White Company has always had a strong vision, based on a great understanding of its customers and a distinct emotive proposition: the calmness and serenity that comes with a bright, perfectly ordered, home environment.’
Maguire explains that making this a reality has involved creating clearly defined ‘wardrobes’ devoted to individual products that make it easier for the shopper to ‘read’ the store and to quickly identify the separate product areas.
There are also a number of visual tricks used to grab the customer’s eye and give prominence to specific items.
- Key architectural elements have been used, such as high-level shelves on columns and raised product-focussed illuminated displays that relate to the merchandise underneath them.
- This replaces the need for graphics and signage and puts more emphasis on product-led visual merchandising to guide customers to individual areas
- We introduced dedicated pieces of display equipment, such as the Christmas stocking unit that allows shoppers to select a Santa loot bag and then choose from a range of gifts to fill it.
Making a store look good is about understanding why a shopper is in your store and then making it more straightforward for them to see how the lines you have to offer work. Done effectively, with ‘fascination points’ (specific displays intended to capture attention), ‘colour blocking’ and effective merchandise grouping, even the most mundane products can be made to sell themselves and, with a little more effort, to turn a shop into a little piece of theatre.
The White Company has fewer than 20 shops, but in its larger branches, room-sets have been introduced, giving customers a sense of how individual items work when combined with others to create a complete interior. Shoppers sometimes need encouragement to work out how things fit together, and this is one way of doing it.