Having a deliberate retail store layout is important for maximizing revenue for your business. By creating a proper layout plan, retailers can strategically direct shoppers to high-priority products within their premises, drive impulse sales, manage customer flow, stay organized, and create a positive customer experience. In this article, we will share with you the steps and strategies you need to employ in the retail design process to maximize sales.
The Brief
This stage involves communicating what your brand should stand for in the eyes of the customer and the value your products add to back up the promises your brand makes. At the briefing stage you also want to outline the diversity and extremes of the spaces your brand will exist across.
Store Audit, Competitor Check and Best Practice Review
After the brief, you need to do a store audit for a few number of stores to outline the issues and opportunities and to visually map how your brand currently performs. This will give you a map as to how your rebranding will look like.
Floor Plan Design
Once the audit is done, the initial design concepts selected can be created that explore the interior look-and of a typical store. This is the Initial expression of how your brand can be executed in a 3D scenario.
Focus on the First Floor
The ground floor is the center of attraction for a majority of the customers. It is where customers familiarize themselves with the store and identify products. Many customers prefer to navigate the floor of a retail store they initially entered. Walking up and down stairs or using elevators and escalators to navigate a store is tiresome and boring for the customers hence it hurts customer flow. We recommend that if you have plans for a store with multiple floors, account for the preferences of first floor shoppers by using this space for the feature or high-margin merchandise in your retail mix. When possible, planning for a single floor store design will optimize the customer experience.
Set up a Pilot Store Concept Test
Instead of setting up the whole concept across all stores, we recommend that you try this new design in few selected stores to access the reception of the new concept in the eyes of the customer. A pilot store to help test executions prior to undertaking an elaborate, expensive and large scale roll-outs. Once this is accomplished and the reception is good, you can fully implement the whole concept across all stores.
Conclusion
In conclusion, rebranding is an important procedure that a business should undertake when it is interested in retaining high sales. In order to avoid messing the whole process up, the above tips will surely guarantee a well-executed procedure.
References: Square44, Smartsheet, MaterialsInc
