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Customers no longer go to a store to merely buy a product or avail of a service.
Shopping, an intensely personal activity is also about experience. The expectations from a retail store have changed.
The concept of retail store design covers all aspects of the design of a store ranging from store frontage, signage, furniture, merchandising, display, lighting, graphics, point of sale and decoration.
Objectives of Store Design
Implement the retailer’s strategy
The design must be consistent with and reinforce the retailer’s strategy by meeting the needs of the target market and building a competitive advantage.
Influence Customer Buying Behaviour
Retailers would like the store design to attract customers to the store; enable them to easily locate merchandise of interest keep them in the store for a long time.
Further, they would like to motivate them to make unplanned, impulse purchases, and provide them with a satisfying shopping experience.
Provide Flexibility
As merchandise changes, so must a store’s image. Thus, store planners attempt to design stores with maximum flexibility.
Flexibility can take two forms; the ability to physically move store merchandise, and the ease with which merchandise can be rearranged.
Control Design and Maintenance Costs
For instance, the free-form design found in many specialty stores is more costly to construct and maintain than a design involving rows of shelves in a discount store.
But the free-form design also encourages customers to explore more of the store and thus increases sales.
Store Design Principles
Totality
The entire store has to be conceived as one unit which draws upon the retailer’s very reason for existence, i.e. his vision and mission statement.
At the same time the type of merchandise has to be kept in mind.
Focus
The second principle is Focus, wherein while aspiring to create a beautiful place for the customer to shop in.
The retailer should not forget that the primary focus within the store has to be the product or the merchandise.
Ease of Shopping
The store has been created for the customer, it has to be easy for him to navigate, easy to access and most importantly simple to understand.
No one wants to visit a store where shopping is cumbersome and tedious.
Change and Flexibility
The fast-moving world of the customer means that retailers have to rethink their strategies
It entails having to think more and more about how the design of their stores will cope with the short and long-term future demands of their business, and consumers.
Store Design Elements
Exterior Store Design
The exterior look of the store that draws a customer to the store – it is the first impression that a customer has of the store.
Interesting window displays, an impressive building, and an inviting entrance all work together for the store.
Simple things like the manner in which the store name is written also play a part in attracting the customer’s attention.
The architecture of the building is a combination of the frontage and exterior of the building, the display space and the health and safety provisions provided.
Exterior Store Design: Store Marquee
The store marquee is the first mark of identification of the retailer or the retail store.
It helps the retailer identifying the store and attracting customers and is an integral part of the building façade.
Examples entail – Starbucks Mermaid, Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders from KFC
Exterior Store Design: The Storefront
The storefront is a reflection of the personality of the store. The storefront and store exterior should be inviting for a customer to actually enter the store.
A cluttered, dirty storefront will be one of the first factors, which will actually deter a customer from entering the retail store.
Storefront is typically straight fronts, angled fronts or arcade fronts.
The straight front runs parallel to the sidewalk; Angled front is one which is at a slight angle to traffic; Arcade fronts are usually spacious. They allow the window merchandise closely.
Interior Store Design
Interior store design is a function of the aesthetics within the store, the merchandise sold within and the space used for the same, and the overall layout of the store for selling the merchandise.
Space Planning
Atmospherics and Aesthetics
Store Layout
1. Space Planning
Space planning helps a retailer determine the amount of space available for selling and for storage
It also helps determine the following: The location of various departments and various products within the department- the creation of planograms.
This video is on Store Design - Part 1 and it has the following sub-topics.
Time Stamps
0:00 What is Retail Store Design?
1:09 Objectives of Store Design
2:17 Store Design Principles
3:28 Store Design Elements
3:44 Exterior Store Design
5:11 Interior Store Design
10:36 Store Design – Examples
