The high street has seen some troubled times in recent years with the rise and rise of internet shopping. Busy lifestyles and better broadband connections have lead to an increase in the amount of people shopping online. Everything from shoes and clothes to groceries and electrical items can be ordered in a matter of minutes, paid for via secure checkout and delivered right to your door. So how can you get people into your store and get them to hang around long enough to spend money?
The answer is visual merchandising: the art of making your products look good enough to buy. Visual merchandising is not just about creating a fancy window display; it’s about every single aspect of your store. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Maximise your floor fixtures by displaying your best selling items in a prominent display. For example, angle the fixtures so that your customers have to walk past your best products to make their way through your store. If you sell clothing then try to create a display that sells a look, for example display your best selling jeans with a funky top and accessories such as belts, handbags etc to encourage add-on sales.
- Use graphics such as hanging ceiling banners, wall graphics, and A4 fixture toppers to convey a variety of things. Graphics can be used to let customers know what they’ll find in a particular section of your store. You can also use them to display examples of your products; for example a bakery might display a mouth-watering close-up of a cupcake on a large wall graphic to stimulate the senses of anyone entering their store.
- Good housekeeping is also a vital part of visual merchandising. Make sure that your products are displayed well to start with and that the standards are maintained throughout the day. Customers tend to move items around your store so ensure someone is deployed to keeping the store tidy. Pick up rubbish as and when it gets dropped; and ensure that you have daily and weekly cleaning tasks in place such as sweeping, mopping and polishing to keep your store looking its best.