I LOVE a fruit and vegetable market stall. Beautifully displayed produce, polished and stacked, only the best items on display. Great use of nature’s fantastic colours, shapes and smells, an assault on all the senses, as good retail should be.
Market stalls have perfect retail standards, each item is in its place, with the invitation, no, compulsion to touch, squeeze, sniff. Inspiration and ideas are abundant, seasonality, something new, an unthought of combination of flavours. Stall owners are not shy of using theatrics to create an atmosphere, fantastic customer service, banter with regular customers along with quick efficient service and knowledge, customers can feel the personality and care oozing from the stall, returning week after week for more.
These factors add up to one of the best physical retail experiences you can have and visual merchandising principles are front and centre.
Visual merchandising is ultimately the art of ensuring customers see all of the offer, are inspired and feel connected ultimately making a purchase. What can we learn from the market stall and adapt for any retail experience?
Fruits and Vegetables Stall
1. The importance of the store front
Windows are your free billboard to the world, you have a few seconds to make customers stop in their tracks and step off the pavement into your store. Ensure they are impactful, show a clear message and don’t under estimate the power of humour and fun. They should also be refreshed regularly not just with product but the look and feel, create a window calendar to help with planning and budgeting. Think about how windows look once the store is closed, lighting is important of course along with use of QR codes to encourage window shopping whatever the time of day.
Windows are an opportunity to re enforce brand image, linking all channels together. The look and feel of a window display could be carried on throughout the store and product displayed in the window should be merchandised at the front of the store. Social media and online platforms could mirror the theme to embed a message or promotion.
Windows Craig & Rose NH 2
Windows Glassworks
2. Inspire, engage and excite
Give customers a reason to shop in a physical space, an experience, not just a transactional interaction. Curate inspired product stories, and display product from across categories to create unexpected co-ordinated stories, think about colour, texture and end use, encouraging customers to buy into a total look. Have fun with displays, can you incorporate props, furniture, graphics, plants? Be brave and creative inject some theatre and interaction into the retail environment, demonstrate to customers how product could fit into their home, lifestyle or wardrobe.
Perennial Gift Shop York Gate 2
Co-ordinated looks
Glassworks
Balance these lifestyle looks with destination areas of your key items, easy to spot fixtures merchandised with all one product type. These add rhythm to a space contrasting with co-ordinated sections and signpost that you are the go-to place for specific items. Customers can see all of the colours, shapes, sizes in one place and may well by one in every colour.
Radley
3. Creating an ideal customer journey
Customers need subtle clues to ensure they travel through the whole space, see all the product on offer, and finally make a transaction easily. Obviously there needs to be space between fixtures for ease of navigation but also create focal points within the store environment to draw customers further in. These focal points could be a product story, a display, graphic or colour block, anything that catches the eye people are naturally drawn to. Use of fixtures is important too, ensure you have the correct fixture for the product type so that you can maximise capacity and show items to their best advantage. Think about category adjacencies, do they make sense and create a flow to the retail space.
It is also much more interesting to have a range of different fixture types and wall bay configurations adding interest and creating those all important focal points. Think about the cubic space, not just the floor and walls, can you hang displays, lighting or product in certain areas to fill this area and draw the eye in?
Petersham Nurseries
Places to dwell, maybe sit, and contemplate purchasing decisions are an important part of the customer journey. These are important VM spaces that make all the difference between online and physical shopping. Encourage customers feel to take their time, stop, touch and chat whilst stepping into the brand experience. These spaces can be extremely flexible and be turned into workshop, event or customisation areas.
Finally, making a purchase should be simple and quick for customers, cash desks need to be easy to see and find and queues minimised. This part of the customer journey is critical, from a VM perspective cash desks should be uncluttered and easy for customers to carry out the transaction. An important opportunity for the sales team to interact with customers, gather important data and develop brand loyalty.
Visual merchandising is a silent form of customer service, if done correctly a customer can see everything offer and find any size, colour, style without the help of the sales team. They will understand the brand, feel inspired and want to make a purchase, tell their own tribe, and come back again.
These visual merchandising principles are important factors to consider when laying out, planning and merchandising a store. VM should be integrated at the beginning of the buying process or at the start of a store design project, this will help to ensure that product stores and the retail experience is maximised when customers enter the retail space.
I’m off to my local market for some more inspiration!