Planning your refit: 5 key points to make it a success

1. Get your floorplan right

Understand how people move, and where you want them to go. Ask yourself: do you need to keep them in sight? How high are your display units going to be? How much space do you have to play with? If you have taller display units, you’ll want more open sightlines and avenues, whereas, with lower units, you can have more geometric and irregular layouts. A good floorplan can be fixed or flexible and can be used to channel customers towards specific parts of the shop.

2. Make an entrance, and make it work.

As in every walk of life first impressions count, so give your customers something to remember when they step inside. You want them to be able to see into your shop, so low units work best – and you want something to entice them into engaging with your products – something to stimulate their senses. Invite them in with open, tabletop-height displays and entice them to feel the softness of jerseys, smell the fragrance of soaps, see the range of colours available.

3. Get into the zone

Zone your products if you can, dividing them into natural categories to help your customers find them more easily. Use signage, floor and wall decals, and colour/texture variations in your shelves and racks, to create zones within your store. There is a balance to be struck here – you need to know your customers, and think carefully how you can help them navigate the store most easily- too many zones will render them meaningless, and too few will be unhelpful. If you have any fast-moving, popular lines, you can use them to shape customer journeys through your shop. Combined with your floor plan use these fast-moving lines to draw customers past special offers, impulse purchases, or seasonal product. Don’t overuse this by putting your top-selling products at the back of the store, and then building a maze for your customers.

4. Build to the right

It’s a well-established feature of human beings is that we, in the majority, prefer to turn right rather than left, and look to the right rather than the left. That means putting your fast-moving goods in the right place. Go back to your floor plan, and if your space allows, see if you can bring your entrance together with a right-hand turn for your customers. If your space allows it, you can flow customers through your shop using semi-permanent displays, and create flexible branches from your main avenue using mobile and reconfigurable units.

5. Get the look.

A customer’s first purchase is made with their eyes – either they buy-in to your vision or they don’t. If they don’t, then selling to them is simply going to be a harder proposition for you. It goes without saying that you need to make your shop look great, but saying that is easier than achieving it. Not only do you need to draw customers’ attention in the right direction without overwhelming them, but you also have to knit the whole shop together in one look. Graphic design, fit and finish, flooring, and lighting all need to work towards building a visual whole.

This just scratching the surface of what you need to think about for a shop refit, but hopefully reading this will have got you thinking about what’s involved. We’ve designed and constructed many shop refits in our time using our skills in exhibition stand design and floor planning. If you’re considering a refit and want to take advantage of our expertise, why not give us a call.