New showroom offers unique window and door shopping experience

If you could put yourself in your product’s shoes, I think you’d find that products are looking for the same thing as shoppers. The time-honored concept of the right place, the right price, the right time, for the right shopper is still the key to greater store productivity

Even though studies show that as much as 80 percent of shoppers’ time is spent meandering through the store in search of their desired products and only 20 percent in selecting items for their baskets, stores still resist optimization best practices in favor of cluttered aisles and obscure SKUs. A dependence on impulse purchases — pile it high and let it fly — often proves less productive than working to reverse that 80/20 ratio.

Shoppers enter a store with a notion of how much time they intend to spend on that particular mission. If a retailer could help a customer find items faster so they could accomplish their shopping mission quicker, there would be time left over for more browsing, especially if the space is engaging.

Fitting SKUs, space and customer time together is the key to optimization and a more productive store. Without spending too much time on how to optimize SKUs, there are a few things to remember when going through this exercise.

Wouldn’t life be that much easier if everything were optimized? All the stoplights on the way to work were green, the remote for the TV was always in the first place you looked, all the socks came out of the dryer paired off and accounted for? If everything were optimized, think of all the extra time you’d have, not to mention the extra space. If I optimized my garage at home, tools would be easier to find, the electrical extension cords wouldn’t be tangled, I wouldn’t have to shimmy between the bikes and the lawn mower and I might actually be able to get both cars in for a change. It would be….well…perfect.

Most of us know that when it comes to retail, we are rarely, if ever, optimized. New brands sometimes take years to figure out just the right mix of what attracts and satisfies customers and what doesn’t work at all. And since shopper passions can change, seemingly with the weather, it’s difficult to keep aspects of our brands optimized. Optimization typically refers to assortment, but I believe optimization can be applied to many, maybe all, aspects of a store or space.

When we optimize our assortments, we can free up space and give it back to the experience. We know that a wider aisle is easier to shop, and we’ve seen time and time again how a more focused assortment can lead to higher sales. Fewer, better choices, the right choices, can lead to more time, more exploration, and more purchases.

When you ask an architect to envision the Store of the Future, their mind races with the opportunities of the clean sheet of paper, unlimited budgets and unlimited resources! The reality of the store of the future is altogether different.

The Great Recession has left us with smaller budgets, dwindling resources and consumers who shop less. And according to the 2007 Economic Census, there were 1,122,703 retail establishments in the United States and a total of 14.2 billion square feet of retail spaces. With such an abundance of existing shopping space, the question to solve is: How will the existing retail environment of today be transformed into the Store of the Future, enticing the shopper and energizing the store personnel to provide a greater return on investment for the retailer?

Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers an exciting platform for renovating retail space, when it is appropriately used by design, construction and executive teams. Building models are constructed from digital representations of parts and components used in construction, complete with quantities and physical properties of the materials used.

These information-rich models allow simulation of things like heating or cooling loads, or physical weight loads. They allow an owner to tap into a robust database of information for use in identifying maintenance needs or merchandising opportunities over the life cycle of a building. In the future, BIM will drive a shift in construction towards premanufacturing or panelization of building components, reducing construction time and waste to provide tighter and more accurate bids.

There’s a LOT of talk under our roof here at Interbrand about the digital aspects of retail branding. Many brands are busy developing or executing digital strategies, some a little further along than others. If you don’t have a strategy for how digital serves your brand, you need to start. Because it isn’t a fad and it isn’t going to go away anytime soon. A recent experience illuminated a key differentiator in experience between the digital and the tangible: the mess.

A recent trip to a common mall brand illustrates why many of your customers would rather go online than come into the store. My shopping trip yielded a table of jeans that looked like someone had slept in the middle of them. Sizes everywhere. This wash here, that wash there. Little if any organization around style and fit, the two things I need to select a purchase. Not simple. Definitely not clean. A complete and absolute mess. The product, not necessarily inexpensive, certainly wasn’t being treated well and in a manner which would actually help me buy it. If anything, it was a huge turnoff and the haphazard display made it frustrating to shop. (You don’t want your store looking like my kid’s bedroom. It isn’t pretty.) It may not have been the company’s intent to drive people out of the store to their website, but that was the outcome.

When I log onto a retail site, the cheerful models peer back at me and give me a bit of the vibe of what to expect from the brand. If I need a size, no problem, I click to see if they have what I need in stock. A simple, clean, no-mess experience. Product looks great on or off a model. No stock, no problem, I know quickly and can move on. This isn’t to say that the digital realm is mess-proof. Certainly, all web experiences are not created equal and some end up being hard to use.

Even while a company may be lax tidying up after the chaos we shoppers leave in our wake, the tangible world still has its advantages. Try as they might, online experience can’t let me feel something.

A: When I’m shopping at my local Kroger.

No, not the “Post” as in Raisin Bran; I’m referring to the physical post, or column, that is in the cereal aisle at my store.

The scene is this: my wife asks me to go get the Multi-Grain Cheerios so she can shop in peace for 10 minutes. She says, “Get the big box, unless the smaller box is on sale,” adding, “The Cheerios are close to the post about half-way down the aisle.”

If she wouldn’t have given me that navigational pointer, she probably would have bought herself 15 minutes of peace. The merchandise presentation in the cereal aisle is such a mess, so lacking in organization, I could easily have squandered more time, forced to scan every package, not finding what I was looking for. But since she gave me the post as my pole star, I managed to navigate past the lions and tigers and bears to the Cheerios. After a moment of anxiety while I scan the shelf for validation—Ta-dah!—I find the Mutli-Grain big box not on sale!

Contrast this with my second mission, during which my wife gets only a few minutes of peace.