What does it take to impress the visitors in your store? The quality of products is obviously important but even the best of items are going be put down by poor display choices.
Retail interior design puts heavy emphasis on displaying products in the most adequate and attractive way. If you haven’t put any thought into the arrangements of items around your commercial space, the time may be right to reconsider the elements of retail interior design.
Before moving on to anything else, let’s shed some light on visual merchandising and why it’s so important for retailers.
Visual merchandising is the process of designing your floor layout and picking the elements of commercial interior design for the purpose of highlighting products and optimising sales. Good visual merchandising improves the customer experience and it could even have a bit of an impact on the products that your store visitors opt for.
As a customer, you’ve probably found yourself purchasing five items when you came in the store for just one. Visual merchandising is usually to blame for such impulse purchases. It makes products incredibly attractive, even irresistible. Floor layout, isle spacing, and the correct placement of high margin items all play a role in effective visual merchandising.
If you want to put together the perfect store display or completely reorganise your boutique, you may consider enlisting a professional interior design firm in Singapore for help. Partnering up with an interior designer will give you a key glimpse inside buyer psychology and you will learn why certain arrangements make a lot more sense than others.
There are numerous highly intricate visual merchandising techniques but let’s begin with the basics.
If you own and operate a large retail space, you’ll be responsible for helping visitors overcome confusion.
People will get frustrated if they cannot find the items they’re looking for. When visitors get frustrated, they will leave the shop without buying anything.
Signs and labels are ideal for pointing visitors to the isle that they need. Signs and labels can be designed to look sophisticated and to fit inside your brand identity. Apart from being practical, they can easily become an aesthetically pleasing part of the retail interior design.
Navigation signage is of paramount importance when you’re selling more than one item or you have multiple product categories. It’s a good idea to use signs even within the same isle. A map that’s placed at the entrance is also a good choice because it will save visitors a lot of time and direct their attention to the specific items they want to acquire.
When dealing with seasonal products, you will need to change the product displays every few months. You don’t want out of season products to be featured centrally.
Put seasonal merchandise and high margin items in the front of the store. These are the product you want people to see immediately when they enter the commercial venue.
Seasonal items should typically be sold within a specified period of time. If you have merchandise left after the end of the season, you’ll either have to offer it at a discounted price or you’ll have to throw it all away.
If the amount of seasonal merchandise is small, feature high margin items alongside these products. High margin items are the ones that generate the highest level of revenue for your business. Hence, you want people to notice and to feel attracted to these items immediately.
Every retail interior designer in Singapore will tell you that display colours matter a lot.
The psychology of colour is employed here. Every tone provokes a specific emotional response. In addition, a good colour combination (either contrasting or complimentary tones) will look appealing and harmonious.
Use the brightest tones in the displays that you want people to notice first. More subdued hues are suitable for secondary items and displays.
It’s interesting to point out that people tend to recall colours much more than individual items. Research suggests that over 60 per cent of purchasing decisions are based on colour alone! Thus, don’t hesitate to experiment with different combinations and keep the ones that result in the most stunning and unique displays.
Do you want to direct attention towards certain items in your store? If so, you should use light creatively to guide the eye towards the respective display.
Light is probably the single most important element in retail interior design. There are parts of the store that need to be brightly illuminated, areas that should feature flattering light (dressing rooms) and places that will benefit from more subdued lights.
As far as product displays go, accent lighting is the best. It focuses on a specific display. The goal can be accomplished through a different tone of light or brightness, creating contrast from the primary lighting in the retail venue.
Research is indicative that light, just like colour, tends to have a profound effect on customer behaviour. People tend to spend more time in parts of the store that feature warm light. When dynamic installation light systems are utilised, average purchases per customer increase 1.93 per cent.
You can rely on many techniques to create attractive and personalised product displays. Interior design professionals like the Home Guide team will help you identify the formula that will deliver the best results in your store.
Home Guide has carried out a wide range of Singaporean retail interior design projects. You can find out more about the work we’ve done in our home interior design portfolio. Alternatively, contact us today to inquire about our projects, tell us a bit more about your business and book your first interior design appointment.
