The Boring State of Visual Design in Small-Town Retail
By: David B. Townsend
Tags: Storytelling For Business, Design Process, Visual Design, Retail Merchandising, Display

One of only a handful of stores using Creative Merchandising Displays

The Boring State of Visual Design in Small-Town Retail

In a project with my local downtown business association, I have been doing photo-shoots of retail stores, breweries, and restaurants to feature some Holiday ideas to reserve many shots for several weeks of advertising on social media sites leading up to Christmas.

Over recent years I’ve become a food photographer, which compliments my restaurant marketing consulting. This path evolved both from my B.F.A. in Scene and Lighting Design and a career in fine dining restaurants from the Monterey Peninsula to San Francisco.

This short three week gig was a bit out of my niche, but one does what they can to survive in a Pandemic. Plus, I got to do some on-site photos in the restaurants in town, stretching my comfort zone in terms of limited time and lighting setups available during operational hours for a handful of food services. Most of my best work comes out of my home studio, where I can control all the lighting and presentation. Food styling similarities are not different from creating displays and intrigue in a retail space regarding merchandising.

In my work on this project, I visited nearly three of dozen stores to feature their retail goods and general appeal, and some food as well. Having time constraints, I was shooting in brief half-hour stints at each store. Some managers had prepared and created unique displays. Others had nothing prepared, even though they knew the scope of the project. Fortunately, I brought along a couple of simple lights I could either handhold or place where needed. What most surprised me was the lack of merchandising display knowledge and abysmal lighting. Nearly two-thirds of the stores were still using fluorescent overhead lighting and minimal direct lighting of displays. Where there were attempts at display, they often lacked cohesion or any sense of telling a story. I found only a handful of owners/managers had any finesse in merchandise or the ability to create a story to sell a product. (A few of these used in article pictures)

The retail store planner needs to think both the ‘whole concept’ and a variety of small vignettes where each tabletop, rack, or shelving unit is like a page from a website. Many newer retail owners who grew up with the web and those who have embraced the concept will understand this analogy.

One is creating the physical store as a three-dimensional version of the website. You want to viewer or customer to move about from page to page or display to display, picking up items to place in a cart.

Each tabletop display needs to encourage exploration and a movement on to the next area of the store.

HERE ARE A FEW TECHNIQUES TO ACCOMPLISH THIS GOAL.

Storytelling: You need to have a story that ties products together. For example, if you are a nature or science-themed store, you may have ‘Exploration’ as a theme. A Tabletop display could include binoculars, a bird identification book, comfy socks or walking sticks, and even small stuffed animals and birds. They tell the story of exploring the outdoors. How you place and create a look is where creativity comes to play. Maybe a common theme is Blue; small plush birds, matching kids’ and adult blue socks, waterproof blue binoculars, a book with a bluebird on the cover. Something ties them together besides just being items to use outdoors.

According to the website Visual Retailing, “Great merchandising should produce seamlessly clear storytelling — through aesthetic sensibility and creativity. Merchandisers themselves must be connoisseurs of lighting, layouts, window dressing, and advertising graphics.” *1

Movement: When a customer comes into your site, you need to encourage them to move about from display to display. If you have a seasonal merchandised table at the front of the store, then a second more dynamic table display, similar in theme, halfway into the space will lead them inward. On the second display, build it up in height, possibly in a related or complementary color scheme as the first table display.

One good example of this is the grocery store. Rebecca Rupp writes for a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article on how supermarkets work wrote: “The first supermarket feature you inevitably encounter is the produce department. There’s a good reason for this: the sensory impact of all those scents, textures, and colors makes us feel both upbeat and hungry. Similarly, the store bakery is usually near the entrance, with its scrumptious and pervasive smell of fresh-baked bread”. *2 Not that you’re likely to have a smell factor in a dry-goods or gift store, but colors can create the same type of sensual stimulation for a first-time customer. Once people move about your store, they discover hidden items and possibly purchase gifts or products they may not even know they wanted.

The reason storefront display windows became important in the early part of the twentieth century is that it created intrigue and interest in new products or clothing lines and how to group or use them together. Each window was built around a theme or story. Macy’s in San Francisco, back in the heyday of ‘window display’, had a dozen or more large windows facing the streets. Each window told a story for the various department’s products to the passersby. Then, at Christmas, these became a go-to for regulars and tourists alike as the various holiday themes were designed to amaze and awe.

When designing for retail, one has to use the space with an understanding of how the eye moves up, down, left to right. By using height to build up displays, you force the focus away from what’s at eye level, especially if you use spotlighting, which highlight certain elements within the display. You also need to pay attention to traffic flow. To reiterate the earlier mention of how grocery stores work, place highly desirable, top sellers toward the back of the store so customers will walk through and possibly find an unexpected item along the way. This physiology is why dairy is always in the back of groceries because everyone needs at least one dairy item.

It is also important you have designed the look of your space in a manner that connect with the products you sell. Are you using a singular color on your walls and ceiling or multiple complementary colors from area to area? Do you have slabs of wood or marble or glass for sparkle to accent smaller jewelry type items? Does your décor relate in some logical way to your theme and create a backdrop for what you sell? One of the stores i visited had long horizontal slabs of local pine with the bark still in tack and the grain showing just as an overhead décor and not as part of any displayed feature. What, if anything, this has to do with selling casual clothing, I’m not clear. Granted, if they were selling outdoor sportswear, I would get the connection. In striking contrast, one of our local stores sells high-quality ‘vintage’ clothing. His display racks were unique, and his wall décor was spot-on with the Height-Ashbury theme of the ‘60s and ‘70s, with woodcut in patterns and painted with bright colors, somewhat reminiscent of a Fillmore West music poster. Even the display racks or furniture used in your space need to tie into your store theme. One of the other clothing stores in town sells high-end flannel and comfortable working-man’s shirts. They use an aluminum ladder stretched across custom wood endcaps to hang the shirts from. It totally makes a statement and works beautifully.

Overhead Spot Lights and High Wall Displays- Sunchild’s Parlour Grass Valley, CA

Lighting

Spot lighting and the use of highlights and shadowing are critical to creating interest through contrast and dimension. A narrow-focused spotlight draws the eye to a particular item within a display, and again if the display has some height, it can draw the shopper upward toward something they would not notice with a casual walk-by.

Grocery stores have been using spot lighting in the produce department for more than a decade. Light draws people to colorful seasonal fruits and veggies. Today’s grocers are installing L.E.D. strip lighting within the shelving. This is most prevalent at the checkout gum and candy displays but won’t be long before this practice ends up in the bread aisle or other categories throughout the store.

Many retailers try to minimize cost, so cut corners in designing the site by using the existing lights, normally some ceiling fixture, likely florescent. This is a huge mistake. In today’s retail a fluorescent fixture just has no place-period! “It’s well-established that L.E.D. lighting, while more expensive than fluorescent lighting, can save retailers money on their energy bills. But do L.E.D. lights really deliver higher sales? Research seems to indicate so. In 2010, Dutch researchers lit half of a supermarket with led lights, the other half with traditional fluorescent lights, and then tracked sales over 21 weeks. The researchers found that the L.E.D. -lit portion of the store sold 2% more products per customer over the study period.” *3 You can’t use fluorescent lights any longer, you need to invest in creative and ‘flexible lighting systems’

Simple- Minimal Statement- MINT Grass Valley, CA

Display with a Minimalist Eye, Serve with Embellishment

You do not need a tabletop spilling over with products unless that is the story you are telling. Keep the viewers’ eyes focused on key elements, high priced, rare, attractive in prime view. Think of a typical Kmart, which grew out of the old five & dime store concept with massive shelves of stuff. Today, minimal is better.

The small retail shop cannot, nor should, pack the shelves full like a Kmart or Thrift store. Minimal displays, the Apple Store concept, where a product is viewed, and similar items may exist in backrooms or under tables for variations. Remember the old Hollywood movies where a dress shop had only a few garments on display, and the store clerk went to the back to pull the right size and color? That’s the minimized look many stores should strive, so as not to overwhelm customers. Service takes staff, but then why have a physical store if you are not going to provide personal service to match the shopper’s expectations.

Personal service fills the simple need or expectation for service, which is why people want to shop on-site vs. Online. Not to be overbearing but allow a customer to know you or a salesperson’s presence, so they know someone is there to answer if they have a question. It’s the biggest reason many people like myself never shop at big-box stores.

“One must understand that customers appreciate being treated as unique individuals and that every single one of them has their specific preferences. Tailored services, offers, and suggestions to your consumers increase the competitive advantage in both customer retention and brand loyalty. According to Knexus Research Corp. 56% are more willing to shop with retailers that have personalized customer service.” “One of the main reasons for using personalization is the significant increase in revenue.

Personalized customer service targets the individual customers with respect to their preferences, needs and likes which, in its turn, increases the chances of engagement and higher sales. 40% of consumers from the U.S. responded that they have paid a higher price for a product than planned due to the personalized customer experience.” *4 When it comes to why people choose to shop in a brick-and-mortar site the one niche you have is the aspect of personal service. In a nutshell, In display, less is more. In service, more is expected.

AVOID THESE COMMON MISTAKES:

Using Fluorescent Lights

No highlighting through use of narrow focus spots

Not building up height within displays.

No color coordinating, or module of a color range in racks of clothes

Relying on overhead lights for everything.

Using décor unrelated to the products selling

Missing items (out-of-stocks)

Failing to face-fronting products

Along with my aforementioned restaurant consulting, I’ve had some other strong influences in general retail merchandising. One of my last jobs before leaving the Monterey Peninsula was managing a gourmet foods market in Carmel. Harry, my late partner, had designed the remodeling using Moorish- influences to incorporate into the site’s classic architecture. Harry spent his life designing retail stores and creating display merchandising for various clients, mostly in niche stores selling housewares, cooking, and gifts. His last Christmas working, he decorated nearly 300 trees, everyone a bit different than the next. He began as one of a team of window merchandisers at Macy’s Union Square in the ’70s being, where the dozen or so display windows they did change designs continuously, sometimes one window a week, throughout the various seasons.

So, besides my take on food presentation as a critical aspect of menu development and presentation to the public, to Harry’s influence on my understanding of how the display works, I’d consider myself a fair observer of how today’s retailer is failing when it comes to the shopping experience and most of what I’ve addressed in this writing has nothing to do with our being amid a pandemic.

Retail stores, like restaurants, need to think through a whole concept in the look or presentation. From what you buy and how you plan to display a new item or line with other items in your store, every piece of merchandise becomes part of every other item in your story. I have written about how I approach food photography in other articles because one starts the food styling before the food gets prepared. How is the plate to look? The plating I compare to the presentation one makes in retail with tabletop and window display. Dan Levy said it about his infamous “Schitt’s Creek” TV show. To paraphrase: “The costumes, next to the scripting of words, is as much about the storytelling as the writing.” The same is true of food styling or plating. Next to the ingredients, the presentation is key. The same holds true of merchandising. Every item on a display contributes to allowing a customer to envision them having and using that item to satisfy their lifestyle.

*1 [visualretailing.com/blog/2018/2/the-power-of-storytelling-in-visual-merchandising]

*2 [surviving the sneaky psychology of supermarkets- by Rebecca Rupp- National Geographic]

*3 [How store lighting impacts retail sales by: Jeff Wells, WWW.grocerydive.com]