• Buzz
• GreenTalks
• Classifieds
• Industry Calendar
• Article Archive
• Media Kit
• Reader Service
• Subscribe
• Young Retailer Award
• Survey

Search Our Site:

Published:4/1/2008

The farther your customers walk while visiting your store, the more they’re liable to spend. You have many opportunities to visually guide customers around your store. Our ability to tap into a customer’s natural patterns of recognition and movement creates more opportunities to sell the same customer more on each trip.

The easiest way to do this is to create scenes that make customers move logically from entry, through their next several sightings and stops, and eventually to the cash register. You can tell when customers are walking past some of your best-selling, best-value items by watching how they are attracted to move. Watch their eyes moving left then right, straight ahead or up above.

Which Way to Go?

The way that you create the desire to move from one display to the next, showing the customer more variety and more possibilities for purchasing individual items increases the total value of each customer’s purchase. This is the fun of business. At this time most retailers, including visual experts and consultants, believe that customers initially move to the right, they take note of the height of displays, and their eyes are attracted to light. We can actually control this. We can help each customer have a better shopping experience and buy more by understanding what drives them forward from one point to another.

The patterns of movement have been tracked by countless organizations. The Gap, during its most successful years, definitely wanted entering customers to move to their right. They also made tiered table units that held merchandise in proportion to their manufacturing and selling times. The level of stock gave the first clues to the desirability and cost of the product. They knew how to visually and physically create movement patterns that would develop the need to cover more store area. Gap’s decline in position came simultaneously with the change of store design and merchandising policy. One begins to wonder if this was not one of the major factors for their decline.

We’ll deal with three issues in this article: 1) moving to the right at 45 degrees; 2) creating pyramids; and 3) lighting from visual entry to physical movement. The pyramids of merchandise I refer to are made from the collection of plants that you see being bought together. In virtually all the garden centers that I’ve seen, the flower tables are too long and necessitate too much walking to get from the middle of one aisle to the middle of the next. Continuing from the first article in this series (check out January 2008) is this first physical move into the greenhouse.

Bench Orientation

The first thing to do is to re-orient your plant benches to a 45-degree angle from the principle entry. Each facing of the tables should be no longer than 20 ft. Endcaps should have step units leading from about 12 in. off the floor to just higher than bench height. The center of each bench needs to be elevated by using a stepped pyramid approach. A simple two-step kitchen ladder works well. The plants on this bench should be related to each other, but if the amount of stock is high and the selling periods are long, the same plant can be used again on other benches to make other suggested color or plant arrangements.

The bench separation from side to side should be wide enough for two carts to pass each other. From front to back the benches should be slightly offset so that the display on the second tier away from the front leaves room to pass (see schematic), and the second tier shows a new idea presentation on the front endcap. This way customers can see many more presentations and varieties of combinations than if you made runs of benches 40 ft. or longer. You can try many varieties of groupings depending on stock levels. Each diagonal from bottom to top can either have only one plant in one coloration or the same family in different colors going up vertically or step-by-step different colors, or plants of different families with the same growing period.

Lighting

Since daylight is the least stable source of intensity and color—depending on the day, the time of day, and on the variety of different intensities and coloration from natural daylight—I suggest that incandescent spotlights be used to light the front of each group and to highlight the build-up on the bench. If you visit a Whole Foods store, note that, even when there’s a lot of daylight, the endcap of each gondola is lit with incandescent fixtures. The intensity and the colorization of those items generally make them the best sellers of the entire run of products on the gondola.

The next critical factor of sales is by unit and value. You’ll see the differences from before and after. Just remember that time spent by the customer is not the key deciding factor with which to evaluate sales. The key to shopping is really distance traveled. The more they see, the more they walk … the more they buy.

Joseph Weishar is the founder and president of New Vision Studios in New York City. Hi is a firm believer that successful stores have an intuitive aesthetic. He can be reached at (212) 686-7200 or newvisioninc@earthlink.net.

Merchandising Exercise 2

Take a look at the first exercise from my article in the January 2008 of Green Profit. We might even add to the research that we’re doing to measure the amount of time spent in the space before and after the re-merchandising. You can make copies of the plan and have an employee mark on the plan the paths taken by your shoppers entering the area. If there’s a secondary entry, then see if the same type of movement takes place.