Upon entering a retail space, customers begin reading the brand messaging in the retail display. Elements of the shop’s design broadcast messages about a brand, describing its quality, style, and even its efforts toward sustainability. These messages are often intentional, being curated by design-conscious retailers who want to ensure that their shop space is an extension of their company’s core values. However, for those retailers who don’t give their shop design the same consideration, a customer may be left with a lesser impression.
Retailers have a number of considerations to make within their shop design and can harness furniture, layouts, and shop fittings to best communicate their intended values. Reviewing your current store design is always beneficial not only to ensure that your shop aesthetic is working well but also to find potential ways to improve how your retail space communicates a brand message.
Orientation
One of the most fundamental considerations of your store design is customer orientation. If a shop’s layout is not conducive to effortless navigation, then customers are more likely to become frustrated when trying to browse or find products.
Effective and orienting design relies on a combination of retail aesthetics, such as spotlighting and freestanding displays, and clear, concise directions, mounted on high-quality fixings and stand offs.
Sustainability
As customers place a greater value on the environmental efforts made by the brands they support, retailers must ensure their own sustainable actions are described through store design. This communication, such as locally-sourced shop furniture, helps customers to understand that their purchases are conducive to ethical retail, relieving them of potential guilt associated with carbon costly alternatives.
Value
A product’s value is determined not solely by its own manufacturing and quality but by the stand and fixing upon which it is displayed. Products that are pictured on sleek and impressive posters or shelves have a greater impression of quality than those attached or mounted on lesser quality fixings. Retailers, especially those wanting to communicate a certain degree of value or craftsmanship should certainly ensure that their store design complements and even elevates the quality of their products.
Lifestyle
Elmer Wheeler coined the phrase, you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. This remains a crucial aspect of retail, even advising how shops should curate their store design. The interior designs of many successful high street retailers will not only describe or portray products themselves but the lifestyle associations too.
High street brands, such as Lush and The Body Shop, are excellent examples of this because their brand messaging in their retail display seeks to describe not only the organic value of their products but also the wider lifestyle associations of wellness, which is described in each part of their store design and sign fittings.
Information
Signs and displays are also important for the communication of information, details specific to products or services. Retailers should pay attention to the way in which such resources are displayed because customers generally favour concise and relevant information. Product and brand details should be described succinctly, being able to both grab the attention of those browsing and communicate all necessary information before it is lost.