Visual Merchandising 101: How to Create Store Designs With High-Converting

Displays
When you're diving into the world of retail either through a pop-up shop or your own boutique
retail store, one of the key sales metrics you're going to want to focus on is "sales per square
footage," which is the average revenue a retail business generates for every square foot of
sales space.
Essentially, your "retail space" has to be your most productive and most efficient
salesperson, and how you go about optimizing your sales space for maximum revenue is to
employ the art and science of visual merchandising.
I can already imagine the grimace upon some of your faces upon seeing the word "visual,"
thinking to yourself that you're not creative, artistic, or stylish enough to make your retail
space look good enough to lure customers in and persuade them to hand over their money
for your products.
Yes, the discipline requires a sense of aesthetic, but remember that it's also a science, which
means that it's a tried and true method that has been studied with results to show for it,
results that you can replicate and recreate for your own store.
However, it's also important to recognize that the field of visual merchandising encompasses
a lot of distinctive retail design topics and covers everything from creating the window
display a prospective customer first sees, to the signage you put up and the layout you
decide on to direct your traffic and a whole lot more.
In this post, I'll be covering how you can go about creating effective merchandising displays
in your store that not only catch your target customer's attention, but gets them to make a
purchase as well.
Let's get started.

Begin with Your Target Customer In Mind

Knowing your target customer inside and out will help you tremendously when it comes
creating effective merchandising displays. I'm not just talking about being familiar with

demographic data like their age, income, and education level, but digging a little deeper into
their psychographics and behaviours. In other words, targeting not just individual customers,
but their lifestyles.
For example, popular retail brand Abercrombie & Fitch is seen as having done both an
effective andcontroversial job targeting its stores and layout to its target demographic of 1824 year old "All-American," "cool kids." This Reddit AMA by an A&F employee is filled with
insights on how the company creates its design and policies based on what they know both
about their target customers and more importantly, their parents, for better or worse that is.

Find Some Inspiration

Thanks to the Internet you no longer have to wait around for that brilliant idea to hit you when
you're thinking about putting together your next merchandising display. Instead, there are a
number of invaluable resources available in the form of blogs, boards, and more. Some of
the ones I recommend checking out are the following:

Retail Design Blog

Creative Window

Pinterest

Remember that People Have 5 Senses, Not 1

It can be really easy to focus on just creating visually stimulating displays and forget about
the other four senses, but the secret to creating an engaging and immersive experience is to
create a multi-sensory experience or what's known in the industry as "sensory
branding." Let's take a closer look at how you could go about doing just that:

Sight: There are an endless array of visual cues you can play around with to
communicate your message. From using colors for their psychological triggers,
to leveraging lighting, symmetry, balance, contrast, and focus to direct and
control where a customer looks and for how long, it's one of the most
fascinating components of merchandising.

Sound: The music you play in your store has such a profound yet subtle effect
on how your customers behave in store. Depending on who you're trying to
target and bring in, you can slow people down by playing more mellow music
and causing them to browse, or playing Top 40 to communicate that you want
teenagers in your store and so on.

Touch: This one's probably the easiest to get right in that you need to simply
remember to put your best foot forward and give customers the ability to touch,
feel, and try out whatever it is you're looking to sell.

Smell: Believe it or not, there's an entire science to what's referred to as "scent

marketing," with several studies and real-world case studies of global brands
like Samsung, Sony, and Verizon applying it to their advantage. The reason
being that smell is considered to be a fast track to the system in your brain that
controls both emotion and memory, two very prominent factors behind why we
choose one brand over another.

Taste: This can work magic if you happen to be in the business of selling
consumables, giving people the ability to taste and sample before they buy is
the equivalent of letting people try on clothes, a general and effective best
practice.

Show, Don't Tell

Before people purchase something they typically want an idea of what it will look and feel
like. To accommodate this need you can set up your merchandise display in a way people
identify with and could envision in their own home or on themselves.
For example, the sales floor in furniture stores are set-up with displays that make it easy for
people to envision how the same products could be set-up in their own homes, or
kitchenware stores having their merchandize displayed like how it might look in a given
kitchen and so on.
Another prominent way apparel retailers do this is by creating policies that require their sales
staff to wear the clothing they're selling. And of course, the most tried and true example of
this would be the mannequin, who you could style according to your latest releases and
style.

This tactic gives prospective customers an immediate point of reference and as soon as they
can envision your product on themselves or in their homes, you can consider it as good as
sold.

Group Like with Like

Grouping like products with like products will give your customers additional reasons
to buy more items from you, but it also has a more utilitarian reasoning behind it,
namely saving them time from looking around and trying to mix and match things. Its
one of the reasons grocery stores will put dips right beside their chips, or peanut
butter with jams.
You can also think of it as creating categories, but you dont need to limit your
creativity there, you can also create groupings within categories. That means
having merchandise that might be the same color, price, size, or type together.

The Rule of Three

In creating displays, most visual merchandisers will often refer to the rule of three, which
means that when creating a display, try to work in sets of three. This means that based on
how youre arranging your products, youll want to have three of them side by side, instead of
just one. For example, if you were arranging things by height, youd have items that were
short, medium, and tall.
The reason behind this thinking is that our eyes are most likely to keep moving and looking
around when were looking at something asymmetrical, because when we see some
symmetrical or balanced they stop dead in their track.
This also alludes to the "Pyramid Principle," where if you have one item at the top, and all
other items one step down, it forces the eye to look at the focal point and then work its way
down.

Let Light Dictate Mood and Attention

This again ties into engaging your customers senses (see above) and guiding them to
experience different moods and emotions based on your stores lighting. Whether they feel

like theyre in a nightclub, a fashion runway, or right at home will depend largely on how you
decide to use lighting.
Using spotlights to highlight certain products is also a surefire way to direct attention and
make sure people pay attention to your top products.

Lastly, Don't Forget to Change It Up

Remember that when trying to optimize your square footage for the most amount of sales, a
scientific approach of formulating a hypothesis, executing on your idea, and then testing for
results will put you in the routine of trying out new ideas and sticking with what works.
With these tips in mind, go out and give them a shot on one of your merchandising display to
see for yourself how you can increase sales through the way you display your products and
create a more engaging experience.

Seni dari Visual Merchandising

Kamis, 21 Pebruari 2013 16:44

Sektor
ritel
saat ini penuh sesak karena banyaknya pemain baru yang masuk per harinya. Keadaan
tersebut sebetulnya tidak membuat pasar menjadi lebih besar, melainkan pasar
dituntut untuk lebih cerdas atau smart. Maklum. umumnya konsumen sudah lebih
sadar akan hal-hal yang baru..Konsumen yang loyal misal terhadap satu toko saat ini
terbilang sudah tidak ada lagi. Kostumer harus dibujuk, diterima dengan ramah, dijamu
dan dilayani agar mau datang ke toko.
Lebih dari itu, yang dbutuhkan dan sedang menjadi tren saat ini adalah toko yang unik
dan terbilang menpunyai ciri lain dari yang lain (Visual Merchandising) . Konsep ini

sedang banyak peminatnya

pengunjung.

dan tergolong mampu menyedot perhatian banyak

Visual Merchandising adalah kombinasi tanpa batas dari beberapa element seperti
warna, tekstur, aroma, pencahayaan, rhytym dan konsep tata suara. Visual
Merchandising adalah presentasi dari sebuah barang yang baik. Visual Merchandising
merupakan titik pusat warna, aksesoris dan mempunyai sifat menjelaskan.
Visual Merchandising saat ini tidak lagi hanya sekedar bagaimana membuat barang
agar terlihat atraktif untuk kostumer. Lebih dari itu harus mempu menjual melalui suatu
media yang bisa dilihat (visual). Visual Merchandising juga merupakan suatu cara bagi
ritel untuk berkata dan mewakili mereka . Jadi maknanya lebih dari sekedar
mempertunjukkan barang melainkan tujuan akhirnya adalah bagaimana agar barang
tersebut laku dijual.
Display harusnya bisa sangat menggoda pembelanja uutuk membelinya . Display adalah
alah satu penarik perhatian seperti halnya sebuah gambar.Display tujuannya adalah
untuk memperoleh perhatian pembelanja lewat image dan gaya. Sehingga pembelanja
diharapkan membuat suatu statement dengan barang tersebut.

Agar Visual Merchandising Efektif

Colour:
Colour atau Warna adalah sangat efektif bagi sebuah display. Diibaratkan seperti jiwa
dalam sebuah badan. Display yang mempunyai warna dan terkoordinir dengan baik akan
membuat sesuatu yang lain bagi barang dagangan. Skema warna bisa dibuat silih
bergati, mulai dari monokrmatik, anologous, komplementer dan ke netral.

Repetition:
Repetition adalah sebuah tema atau sebuah konsep yang mampu memberikan dampak
kepada barang dagangan agar terlihat menarik.

Scale:
Adalah suatu ukuran yang terhubung secara abnormal atau yang kerap berubah
sekejap/saat tertentu untuk mencuri perhatian pengunjung

Contrast:
Contrast dapat diciptakan dengan bantuan pencahayaan dan warna untuk menarik mata
pengunjung

Humour, surprise and shick:

Element ini bersifar lucu dan sangat surelasistik. Shock atau yang sifatnya goncangan
penggunaanya harus berhati-hati dan tidak boleh sembarangan, agar tidak menyinggung
dan mengganggu pengunjung atau penonton.

Rhytym and motion:

Rhytym and motion adalah sesuatu yang selalu berpindah, bergerak sesuai kehendak
atau bahkan juga bersifat statis untuk mencoba menarik perhaian penonton. Rhytym
yang bergeraknya diam-diam dan dipajang langsung di produk yang dipertunjukkan
biasanya mampu menarik mata pengunjung terhadap produk tersebut.

Aroma

kita pada umumnya mempunyai pengalaman berhubungan dengan aroma yang berbeda
dan bervariasi dari individu ke yang individu. Menghirup bau harum seakan-akan berada
di dunia yang lain dan terasa membuat selalu rindu untuk kembali, segar, romantis
dan trendy.

Props and lighting:

Penyangga dan pencahayaan yang baik dan efektif biasanya akan memancing ingin tahu
penonton terhadap apa yang ada di display. Cahaya dapat menarik perhatian dan
mengajak mata penonton untuk melihat produk yang terdapat di display.