Time to optimise your Store Layout
#visualmerchandising #retail #farmretail
Here’s the next in my series of articles for the Fine Food Digest Magazine. This one considers how we can best optimise our spaces on behalf of our customers while they are full of stock at such busy times of the year.
At this point in the year, you might be feeling that your stock level and range is feeling rather overwhelming, what with Halloween running swiftly into Christmas without a break. So much stock that is time-specific which needs selling and off the shelves within short periods.
This is when it pays more than ever, to take the customer’s eye-view, as it were. Standing back and watching how the customer uses your space, seeing what areas get most traffic (hot-spots), and what gets the least (dark-corners).
Knowing the preferred customer route will inform your positioning of key seasonal displays and associated products. Make sure you walk the customer’s route frequently. This will help to fight complacency and ensure you spot signage that has fallen over, products put back in the wrong places, depleted stock, etc. It is also the means to map out your hot-spot areas – i.e. the bits that the maximum number of customers walk past and have a chance of seeing.
For example, one key area is whatever is straight-ahead from the entrance, as people stop at the threshold and look in – position a table or display in that line of sight to capitalise on its effect. Then where do their eyes and feet go? Where’s the next hot spot on the route? Identify these and you have built yourself a display map. These are key selling points and should be devoted to products you want to promote and sell.
On the other hand, don’t waste these spaces on products that make you little or no return. Display those products in the ‘dark corners’ and customers that are determined to find them will do so, but they will have put in their share of effort in return.
Meanwhile your easy-to-spot and -shop hot-spots will need attention throughout the sales period to keep them stocked up and looking great as products will sell from these spaces. Keep the lighting good, products clearly priced and free of clutter – that way you will maximise the opportunity of all your stock and all your customers.
Need more guidance or a workshop for your team? Please get in touch judy.roberts@rightproductrightplace.co.uk, http://www.rightproductrightplace.co.uk
Want to read more? – here’s a link to the whole magazine. I’m on Page 57!
