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Stores Achieve Success by Design

Written by George Anderson

Back in February of this year, Matt Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said, "2012 is all about the customer."

Mr. Shay's comments came out of findings from the Benchmarks for 2011, Forecasts for 2012 report by the NRF Foundation and KPMG LLP, which discovered a renewed commitment by merchants to engage shoppers through a variety of customer-centric initiatives.

While much of the report focused on capturing opportunities across a variety of sales channels using digital tools, it is also clear that technology combined with store layout and design can have a profound effect on merchants' top and bottom lines.

A lot of the credit given to the renewed emphasis on store design has gone to Apple. By now, anyone who has read anything about the late Apple visionary Steve Jobs knows how much emphasis he put on design. The smallest of details mattered.

Diversity of experience and thinking were key to achieving innovative design, according to Mr. Jobs.

"A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences," Mr. Jobs told Wired in the 1990s. "So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

A recent piece on Entrepreneur.com, identified "myths" that merchants should question when it came to store design.

"It pays to make an effort to break from the norm," Debi Ward Kennedy, a retail consultant, told Entrepreneur.com. "Take those principles of design and bend, break, configure or camouflage them to serve your business instead of the opposite, where you … are held hostage by rules of interior design."

Among ways to break away from the myths were:

  1. Forego painting walls a neutral color. Instead, use color schemes that reinforce and bring your brand to life in the shopping environment.
  2. Don't use vendor-supplied fixtures or others developed for a store's particular channel. Create interiors that don't look like every other competitor in the market.
  3. Limit the use of flexible fixtures to avoid a store giving off "a temporary, noncommittal" message to shoppers.
  4. Invest in talent. It is particularly helpful for small merchants to pay a professional design firm for an initial consultation to pick proper colors and get other tips before tackling the project themselves. Others pay for help in creating window displays.
  5. Chains don't know everything. When it comes to store design, replicating a competitor won't help a store differentiate.

A final piece of advice from Mr. Jobs should be added to any list of store design rules.

"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes," he once said. "It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."

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