While much has been written about decorating homes, the organization and design of retail spaces remain a neglected topic. Foreign brands have brought their solutions and adapted them to the spaces they found here. However, for owners of local smaller shops, it’s more challenging. In the absence of proper educational materials, they are left to more or less successfully adopt foreign solutions or rely on intuition and personal preferences.
Common Challenges for Local Shop Owners
“They have millions for store furnishing; it’s easy for them.”
“I just need to start selling now. I found a few examples online; I’ll just tweak and shorten what’s needed, and it should work.”
“Yeah, I had an architect. She installed some wooden slats; it looks super modern. I don’t know why visitors still don’t stay longer in the store.”
Does your story sound like one of these? Let’s examine the connection between the interior and sales. We’ll see if millions are indeed necessary, why the “tweaking and shortening” approach doesn’t hold water, and why a beautiful store appearance alone doesn’t lead to profit.
The Importance of Retail Space Design
As much as we want it to be different, people are highly predictable beings. The entire field of science that has been researching the connection between the appearance of space and sales success for decades meticulously studies customer behaviors.
Key Insights into Customer Behavior
Today, we know that:
– 99% of people, when entering a store, first turn to the right.
– The first 1.5 meters from the store entrance (5 meters for larger stores) are lost space, the store boundary where people adapt to the space and form their first impression.
– Many will abandon a purchase if forced to stand close to an unknown person.
This list should go on indefinitely. There are many such conclusions, and all must be taken into account when designing a retail space. Knowing that over 60% of all purchases were made during the stay in the store before the pandemic, it is clear that conclusions about customer behavior must be approached seriously and studiously.
Where to start?
In the next few texts, we will present you with the basic rules of designing retail spaces with a high success rate in sales. They should not be applied independently but understood in accordance with the geometry of the space and the location of the facility. We will start with the basics of the facility. You will learn about the existing fundamentals and how to choose the right one based on the size of the space, the type of goods, and the type of customers you want to attract. Also, how to guide customers through the store in the best way for sales. Of course, sometimes the desired effect is achieved only by breaking the rules, and that’s a topic for another time.
How to Make Your Retail Space Sell Itself
The booth we designed for Omcafe was made up of several separate parts with different designs, and you can approach it from all sides, similar to the store.
We are pleased to launch this series. If you are a retail space owner, we invite you to read all the articles in the series, promising a lot of useful information, especially in the first one.
HERE you can read more about the Omcafe project.
