VISUAL MERCHANDISING

Order in the Maze


6 surprising tips on how to maximize sales with simple visual merchandising

Anne Marie Luthro

iam a retail strategist and shopper-insights expert. That means I watch people shop. I study the maze (the retail environment), the mouse (the shopper), and the cheese (whatever that shopper is after).


My job is to make sure the maze, mouse, and cheese are working together to create the best experience possible.


Visual merchandising is an important piece of that maze. Here are six tips to enhance yours.



1. PREVENT PAIN POINTS

There are five tenets of shopping—look, touch, check the price, inform, explore. If we have a pain point in any of those steps, it is in danger of becoming a breaking point.

For example, if frames are in a glass case, I may not want to ask for help and, therefore, that pain point becomes a breaking point, and I move on. The display may look great, but visual merchandising needs to facilitate shopping, not just support a good design.

2. CREATE VISUAL OASES


There are often so many frames along a wall that we need some sort of visual oasis to rest our eyes and, therefore, catch our breath.

The easiest way to do that is with color and color blocking. Create two to three places on the wall where there is no product and you’re not trying to sell anything, other than sharing your brand message and environment. You can do it with humor, color, something fun or even educational—nothing heavy, but something that shifts our brain and lets us refocus.

3. TALK TO MEN


Look at your customer: Men shop as a task, and women shop for excitement or entertainment.


If a woman needs a product, she will find it. Not so with men. It’s important to help them remember where the boundaries are in their category. Whether that’s with verbiage or signs—or the men’s background is light blue and the women’s yellow—there needs to be some system to help men shop.



4. TURN TO THE RIGHT


After entering a store, consumers tend to take a soft right. For the most part, the hard right area is out of their sight lines. Don’t just waste that space, though. Put kids frames there or sale product.

5. MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

If you have to walk 5 feet to a mirror, and need to do that three to four times to see how different frames look, you will reach a breaking point quickly. This is an important part of visual merchandising that’s often overlooked.

We want to see the frame close up on us, so that’s a hand mirror (and you’ll need lots of them). We want to see how the frame looks on our face, so that’s typically a wall mirror. And then we want to see how we wear the frame overall, so that’s a full-length mirror. Do you have all three?

6. MERCHANDISE TO YOUR MARKET

Most of us over the age of 40 have trouble seeing small print, so don’t let the 27-year-old who’s making your signs forget who the audience is.


The same goes for lighting. If you’re under 40 and the store looks over-lit to you, it probably doesn’t to your average shopper.


What if you don’t want to follow the standard visual merchandising guidelines? My advice is this: If you’re going to break them, do it in a big way. Otherwise, stick to the retail rules.

—Anne Marie Luthro (as told to Stephanie K. De Long)



Anne Marie Luthro is the principal of AML Insights, a shopper insights and retail strategy agency in Portland, OR. She began her career as a pioneering member of Envirosell, a renowned retail research agency. There, she developed, practiced, and fine-tuned observational and participant observation research methods. Today Luthro uses that perspective to help clients build, nourish, and keep their shopper base. Her client list includes adidas, Athleta, Estée Lauder Companies, L’Oréal, LVMH, Victoria’s Secret, Oakley, and ESPN.