Grow Your Business

What image do you want your business to project to your market? Do you want your business to look stylish? Trendy? Hip? High quality? Or are you after building a perception of your products as providing value for money? Once you have zeroed in on your brand identity, visual merchandising comes in to express and reinforce it through your product design and mix. Your product design, the way it is presented, and your company’s promotional collaterals – logo, business cards, stationery, and brochures – shape the public’s perception of your company. Visual merchandising’s domain, however, is your store, particularly the way it is laid out to lure customers and keep them coming back.

Visual merchandising is about arranging the store and its contents in a way that will encourage customers to enter, look around, and ultimately make a purchase. Visual merchandising is not confined to boutique and department store window displays. Even top coffee shops, Internet cafés, and supermarkets use its principles in their interior design.

“A visual merchandiser not only arranges the store’s interiors but also considers the movement of its products. If some items aren’t moving, they should be arranged so they would sell more. Merchandisers are experts at shop layout and goods distribution,” says Niña Sandejas, stylist of several music videos and had done the window displays boutiques U and Zara.

Sales clerks with no background in visual merchandising should not be entrusted with the task because a store’s design has a direct effect on sales, although those with an eye for detail and a flair for design would do a good job.

While the store arrangement will depend on the type of establishment, a few visual merchandising rules apply to almost all business types:

1. Know your customers. This is the most important thing, says Bo Escueta, a jewelry designer who previously headed the merchandising department of several major retail food establishments. “Unless you know them, you won’t know what to sell, how to sell, and how to present your wares,” she says.

2. Keep a clean, well-lighted place. But don’t forget to address other senses as well. Aside from making it visually appealing, keep the store nice smelling too. The music should complement the store concept and jibe with the target market. Train the staff to be courteous and knowledgeable.

3. Avoid clutter. Customers must find the store arrangement convenient. “A spacious store makes it easier for the customer to decide what to buy. It's confusing and stressful for a customer, for instance, to be made to dig through a pile of clothes,” says Sandejas.

4. Follow your store’s “walk”. For about a month, track the customers’ natural route, for the areas they tend to stop are good places to place slow-moving items.

5. Mix and match. “Slow-moving items should be mixed with fast-moving ones,” says Sandejas. Mixing merchandises also sends a subtle suggestion on other items the customers might want to buy.

6. Right side and eye level sells more. Premium merchandising points include the right side of the entrance. This follows people’s natural eye movement, which goes from left to right and rests there. The same principle goes for items in refrigerated cases. “The best place to put your slow-moving items is on the right side, where the door handle is,” Escueta says.
7. Put “demand items” at the end of a chain. Demand items are those that people buy, no matter what. Place these in less valuable places, like the deep end of the store, and make customers walk by related items that can be picked up along the way.

8. Make use of holidays. Designate a high-traffic area in the store for seasonal items. This makes it easier for customers to find what they need fast, which in turn would result in more sales.

9. Cross-merchandise. This means placing related products beside each other. “Like if you have chips here, you can put the dips beside it,” Escueta says. It makes shopping easier and the items more noticeable.

10. Don’t forget last-minute buys. The best place for impulse items, or goods customers buy on a whim, would be near the cashier, where they catch the customers’ eye as they wait in line.

Window dressing

Window displays are an art form. Like art pieces, they follow the basic principles of balance and focus, and their cost will depend on the materials used. Here are some tips:

1. Maximize space without messing it up. Every square inch of the window must be put to good use, while balance must be ensured so that the design should not come out lopsided. Display as many items as possible, and in a way that would give customers an idea of how these would be useful in their lives. Keep the space neat by focusing on certain colors, key pieces or themes.

2. Good lighting is important. “Try to add a bit of drama by manipulating the store’s lighting – it should shine strongly on some, such as the mannequins in the store window, but muted in others. While every product should be seen, it’s not necessary to light up everything, or the store would start looking like a warehouse,” advises stylist Niña Sandejas.

3. Find inspiration everywhere. Be a keen observer. Aside from other stores, you can get ideas and inspiration from museums; galleries; history, design, and architecture books; and music, movies, and literature. “Notice if something stands out and figure out why it caught your eye. A great store should make the consumer stop, look, and start buying,” says Sandejas.