What is Visual Merchandising? Mastering the Art of Retail Display Design

What is visual merchandising?

In simple terms, the term visual merchandising refers to the art and science of creating appealing retail displays that attract customers and enhance the overall shopping experience. Ultimately, this process should drive further sales for brands and retailers integrating these techniques into their marketing campaigns.

Sometimes known as retail merchandising, this solution involves strategic product placement within your store interior and store exterior, using every element together to tell a story and capture the attention of your shoppers.

In this blog, we’ll go through the essentials of visual merchandising and show you how mastering your store layout can help you turn your retail space into a powerful sales tool for all discerning shoppers.

To see how our innovative merchandising team can help your business grow, please make an enquiry today.

What is Visual Merchandising? An Overview

At its core, visual merchandising is about creating an environment that draws shoppers through the entrance of your store, encouraging them to explore your interior displays. However, successful visual merchandising techniques aren’t just limited to drawing people into your store. Once inside, you still need to impress potential shoppers enough to make a purchase, so creating an eye-catching layout with a simple customer pathway is essential to your success.

These tactics blend together modern design principles with field marketing strategies, ensuring that retailers can make their stores more engaging and increase the likelihood of their items being purchased. 

This approach doesn't just apply to physical stores though - ecommerce merchandising is also a popular strategy, using digital visuals and images to play a similar role.

Successful visual merchandising strategies usually rely on four key elements:

• Your store exterior: This area includes anything outside your store, including your marquees, window displays and the entrance area.
• The layout of your store: Creating a logical flow that guides customers through the store is imperative to your success, making your store layout incredibly important. This area includes your selling space, personnel space and merchandising space.
• Your interior displays: Your interior display refers to the way you display your merchandise, including your FSDUs (free standing display units) and internal promotional displays.
• Your store design: The store design refers to the interior of your shop, including your floor and wall coverings, permanent fixtures and fittings, and your lighting - the latter of which can be used to highlight key product lines and create a suitable mood.

Other things to consider are the colour schemes used within your retail space (which sets the tone and reinforces your branding), and your signage, which should provide both attractive and clear information for your shoppers.

What Does a Visual Merchandiser Do?

So, what exactly does a professional merchandiser do? Naturally, the answer to this question will differ depending on whether an employee is a junior or a visual merchandising director. However, it's fair to say that it's quite a varied role, regardless of the level an employee is currently working at.

Visual merchandisers use their design skills to promote the image of a retail business or brand, often using detailed planograms and image recognition technology to create suitable visual aids. Retail merchandising jobs will usually include changing things like the store layout and your product displays for the better, as well as planning out customer movement around your store in a way that makes sense. In turn, this process should lead to a sales increase, uniquely promoting your brand.

Of course, there's a lot of thought that goes into a merchandising strategy and it's something that requires some research before getting started, but that's the general gist of it!

Why Is Visual Merchandising So Crucial to Retail?

The modern retail arena is becoming increasingly competitive, which is where visual merchandising can become a real game-changer. After all, a truly well-designed store can influence the purchasing decisions of individual shoppers by making particular products seem more appealing and easier to find. Retail merchandising also helps to build up your brand identity, ensuring that customers remember your company and leave with a positive impression that encourages repeat visits.

The goal is to target passers-by through your retail window displays, turning them not just into customers, but loyal brand ambassadors that return to your shop over and over again. Visual merchandising also allows you to draw in customers from outside your target audience, which can be difficult to do. Not only is the shopping experience improved for these consumers, but you should also make more sales, meaning that everyone is a winner!

Essentially, visual merchandising gives you a competitive advantage over your rivals, enabling you to incorporate a captivating field marketing strategy to boost customer loyalty and retention.

The Importance of Enhancing Your Brand Identity

Brand identity is an important factor for modern retailers and brands - after all, if people aren't aware that you exist, how can you expect them to buy products from you? This is another area in which visual merchandising can really shine, as your design decisions have a direct impact on the in-store environment.

Not only do visual merchandising teams improve the overall appearance of your shop, but they also make potential shoppers more aware of your brand. If you decide to use a similar colour theme to your branding in your interactive displays and signage, you can make your brand identity a focal point in the hearts and minds of your customers. By creating powerful seasonal displays during specific times of the year (both within your store and in your window graphics and shopfront) you can use these themes to highlight your brand as the go-to place for seasonal shopping at certain times of the year.

One example of this is the Christmas holiday season. Retail brands such as John Lewis and Amazon have become respectively associated with Christmas and the Black Friday/Thanksgiving periods, with many people purchasing gifts from these companies at these times of the year.

How Can You Improve Your Visual Merchandising Game?

Mastering the art of visual merchandising requires a sense of creativity, attention to detail, and a deep understanding of modern consumer behaviour. This means that to get ahead, retailers should regularly refresh their window displays to keep them dynamic and seasonal. They should also analyse foot traffic to optimise their store layouts, as well as experiment with different industry trends and techniques to see what resonates with their target audience.

It all comes down to one thing: Creating the perfect shopping experience for your customers, which in turn, encourages repeat purchases. 

It's not as easy as it sounds though, as you'll likely need to conduct and analyse your own market research data, as well as the use of modern, innovative technology. It's imperative that you learn what today’s consumers want from modern brands and their products, so conducting this research is crucial. 

If you're not completely certain about taking a certain path, you can instead test slight variations to your store layout, lighting, signage and colour schemes, comparing a range of metrics to show you which options are most successful.

At Dee Set, we have our own retail and visual merchandising solutions, able to create suitable floor plans and displays that are designed specifically for your retail space. 

To find out more about the different visual merchandising services on offer through Dee Set, why not make an enquiry today?

Use Visual Merchandising to Your Advantage

Visual merchandising is about more than just arranging products. Instead, it’s a powerful way to communicate your brand’s identity, captivate customers, and drive sales - all in one handy package! 

By mastering the exact art and science of retail display design, modern retailers and retail brands can create memorable shopping experiences that leave a lasting impression and boost their bottom line. This approach provides them with a wide range of benefits for those who choose to use this exciting form of field marketing, also making the customer experience much more enjoyable too!

It doesn't matter whether you're a small, independent boutique or a large supermarket chain either, as an effective visual merchandising strategy can set you apart in a vastly overcrowded market, sure to propel you to success in no time. At Dee Set, we’re an expert field marketing team, covering just about every retail discipline you can think of. However, visual merchandising is one of our key offerings, able to truly set your brand apart from the crowd!

To find out more about Dee Set's powerful visual merchandising techniques and our innovative trend analysis technology, all you need to do is get in touch with our expert team!