The Customer Journey: 5 Design Considerations

Your retail space is the tangible expression of your brand, and as such, it needs to make a valuable impression on your customers. The best retail store layouts or retail fixtures, create great customer experiences and drive sales. Stores or fixtures that focus too much on the latter and forget about catering to the customer are making a big mistake. Research shows that customer experience is directly related to sales, so the company who delivers on the front end is going to reap the higher revenue. In today’s “experience economy,” retail stores and fixture design are created to influence the customers’ buying decisions. You might be selling a product or your store might be selling a variety products, but your customers’ experience is often their primary motivation to purchase. Fortunately, you can thoughtfully approach the design and spatial arrangements of your products, fixtures or store to both enhance the customer experience and lift sales. #1 – OFFER A JOURNEY Shoppers are called that for a reason. They shop. Yours is not the first product they looked at or retail store they’ve stepped into. They’ve shopped hundreds or thousands of retail spaces. Your out-of-the-box thinking will be the difference in their experience in your retail space. Consider how you want customers to feel and what you want them to think as they move through your space. Because consumers are emotionally charged, they want a feast for the eyes and they want to feel good as they move through the store. Make this easy for them by grouping like items with like, by having a natural flow through the store as they move from product area to product area, by highlighting the most popular products in an easy-to-see display. I was in a home-goods store this Christmas that had a fabulously-decorated Christmas tree suspended from the ceiling. Beneath the tree were wrapped and unwrapped presents piled up in a lavish, delightful display. It really conveyed the magic of the season and made me want to take a little of it home with me. I made several purchases in there that day! #2 – CHOOSE TIMELESS FIXTURES Trendy fixtures and furniture can be so appealing.  But they are the opposite of “timeless,” and for that reason, they will soon look dated and be out of style. Think classic, not current. Hip, flashy fixtures are pricey and ever-changing, which means you’ll be replacing and updating them frequently. Timeless fixtures have staying power; they are durable and flexible enough to last for years; they are easy to augment or reskin as retail cycles change and progress. Choosing classic fixtures actually helps solidify image as these fixed staples are always in place. Their high quality, eye-catching but subtle design reinforces your brand. #3 – MAKE AN ENTRANCE Some retailers make the mistake of overlooking the entrance to their store, choosing to focus instead of the products and displays inside. This is a big mistake because, although they’re trying to focus on the product, they’re missing an opportunity to attract customers and make that first important impression. Whether you’re entrance is a manual door, huge glass sliding doors, or an enormous open entrance at a mall, your store front is your face. Put your best one on! Eye-catching product displays, digital signage, fixed or hanging graphics pique the interest of passers-by. And that’s all you need – you need to catch the eye of the customer so that they give you a second glance. Once customers step into the store proper, they almost always go to the right. Research shows that shoppers move first to the right and continue around the store in a counter-clockwise pattern, mostly like because most of the world drives on the right and has a tendency to turn right. Use this to your advantage, creating a “path” that takes the customer on a journey around the showroom. The path, of course, should be wide and easy to maneuver; it should be well-lit; descriptive signage and appealing displays should guide the customer seamlessly through the space in an organic way. #4 – LIGHT IT UP After all the creative hard work is done for design concepts and possibly even prototyping, you’ll want purposeful lighting in your fixture or store to spotlight their effort. When choosing lighting, you have two goals in mind: to highlight the merchandise and to create a mood for the customer. Both have to be considered, but one might take precedent over the other. For example, in a jewelry store, the lighting should be warm to create a soft, often romantic, mood. But you wouldn’t want that same lighting in a paint store where you need bold, bright light to make decisions about colors. Setting the right mood in for your products is easy with the right lighting and it will inspire customers. #5 – KEEP IT SHOPPER-FRIENDLY While beautiful design and creative display are admirable and even enviable sometimes, shoppers really just want an easy, pleasant place to shop. It’s important that the lovely interior design supports the shopping experience. At the end of the day, you want customers to brag about your store to their friends, telling them how wonderful it was to be there. Creating shopper-friendly spaces takes a little more work than it might appear. For this reason, bringing your retail showroom design consultant on board with some space planning tools is a smart idea. These preview tools allow you to virtually set up your store and troubleshoot problem areas ahead of time, preventing cramped spaces, poor traffic flow, and bad lighting in reality. To help you create a dynamic showroom interior design concept, an expert showroom design consultant researches your brand and industry, listens to your goals, discusses wants and needs, and considers every moving part of the end product. Facility Source prides itself on innovative, sophisticated design and thorough planning and implementation. Allow our expert Account Executives, designers, and craftsmen to deftly install the final activation, most of which is hand-built in our facility.