Have you ever been shopping in a store and found yourself moving from one product display to the next, completely entranced in the shopping experience, where the products just seem to invite interaction? Like they want to be picked up and inspected?
Conversely, have you ever been in a store where you didn’t really find much of anything appealing and you figure that maybe it’s just you and you aren’t in the mood to shop.
Chances are with the first scenario you’re in a store that handles visual merchandising really well and in the second, the retailer might not be giving it any thought at all.
This is the power of visual merchandising: to present the store and its merchandise in ways that will to attract the attention of potential customers. It’s also about understanding what you customer needs and finding a way to eliminate all of the obstacles that might get them to interact with your products.
For a clothing retailer, if you can get someone to take some items into a dressing room you will typically see a 67% conversion rate from those shoppers. In other words, for every three shoppers that go to your dressing rooms, two are going to buy something. If you display products in such a way that it’s not going to even invite someone to pick up a product, good luck getting them in the dressing room!
Merchandising Fixtures
Of course, a big part of visual merchandising is deciding how you’re going to display your products. There are common fixtures that we use to accomplish this.
Straight racks hold a lot of apparel, but shoppers can only see the frontal view of at most two different products. These are found in most clothing stores, but are very common in discount and off-price stores.
Rounders are typically smaller than most straight racks and can hold the maximum amount of merchandise in a given floorspace. Unfortunately, shoppers have no frontal view of any merchandise on these fixtures. Again, these are very common in discount and off-price retailers. These were by far my favorite type of fixture to hide in as a kid, much to the annoyance of my mother.
Four-ways provide frontal views of merchandise in four different directions. These hold a substantial amount of merchandise, but they are usually more difficult to maintain as stores typically want to highlight multiple products on one rack, which may end up requiring more staff labor.
Gondolas are are extremely versatile and are typically found in grocery, drug, and discount stores.
Flat-tops or tables are extremely common in more luxury-oriented clothing stores. They maximize presentation over product volume.
Oh, and have you ever been in a store that hangs pants like this? This is a custom rack designed to hold pants in a non-traditional way. It’s not a coincidence that these are men’s pants too. A major clothing retailer was surprised at how little men were engaging with their products when displayed folded on a table. Very few were picking them up and looking at them. Why? Because most men don’t want to mess with a nice looking display. They don’t want to have to be responsible for re-folding something and putting it back. The solution: of course, make it as easy a possible by hanging the pants. No fiddly handers or perfectly folded merchandise. And it worked! Men started interacting with the products and sales dramatically increased. And that’s the whole point of visual merchandising: to get shoppers attracted to the store and merchandise. It’s not all about the types of fixtures you display the products on, however. We also need to think about strategies for how we will display products to grab the shopper’s attention. We need techniques for presenting merchandise.
Techniques for presenting merchandise
The first technique is idea-oriented presentation. This is displaying merchandise based on a specific idea or image of the store. For example, this isn’t just any living room as the price tags on everything will attest. This is a living room vignette within an IKEA furniture retailer. All of the products work together to create a unique vision or idea of how to use the merchandise.
Oh and lest you think visual merchandising is only about what you see from inside the store, store windows are a time-tested technique in urban areas for attracting shoppers into the store.
In fact, 50% of women get ideas for clothing from store displays or via window shopping.
We also have Item and Size Presentation. This is probably the most common technique for displaying merchandise. Products are arranged according to item type or size. In this photo you can see a cereal aisle where different sizes and varieties of Cherrios are presented together.
Retailers can also present products together based on their color. This is perhaps one of the boldest methods of visually capturing the shopper’s attention as the retailer runs the risk of combining products together that the shopper may not necessarily see as complimentary. In this example, a small library has organized its books by color, which is a trick that realtors use to make homes look more attractive and organized. How that works with the Dewey decimal system I have no idea.
Some retailers use as much vertical wall space as possible to show off merchandise. Bed, Bath & Beyond as shown here is well known for using as much square footage in their stores as they have available. Even it that means putting products beyond the reach of all but the tallest shoppers.
Tonnage merchandising is the practice of effectively using mass quantities of the product itself to serve as its own visual merchandising. These stacks of bottled water at Sam’s Club not only show off the product, but communicate the volume of the product that they sell regularly.
Bulk merchandising, similar to tonnage merchandising, uses the product as its own visual merchandising. This form of merchandise presentation allows the shopper to choose the volume of product they’re most comfortable with. I took this picture last summer at this candy shop of the main square in Prague. And boy was that candy expensive!
Finally, frontal presentation is about showing as much of the product as possible. In a typical book store you’d probably see the books shelved with their spines out. In this bookstore, each book is faced out providing ample access to each cover. This is far less space efficient, but from a shopping perspective it makes each book much easier to find, makes the shelves more visually interesting, and encourages more book impulse buying.
To recap, a key to retail success is understanding what motivates shoppers to handle and inspect merchandise. Fixtures play an important role in this, but they’re not enough on their own. Retailers also need to use merchandise presentation techniques to show products in their best light and make them inviting to the shopper.