What is Merchandising?

Merchandising is the activity of promoting the sale of goods, especially by their presentation in retail outlets. There was a time when great merchandising was a valuable tool in a retailer’s arsenal against competitors.  Now it’s a cost-saving area.

Yet it is one of the most impactful ways you have to influence a brick and mortar shopper and get them to pause and consider. Shoppers are leaving their homes less and less to venture into the real world of weather, traffic, and parking. Yet we are seeing some of the most exciting store designs ever.

Many shoppers are telling themselves they don’t need to go into a brick and mortar store and pride themselves on shopping online for many items.

But that’s not the case, all and all. But when they’re online, they can’t emotionally connect to the merchandise. And let’s be honest, they’re probably just searching for the cheapest example of what they’re looking for.

Online just can’t deliver the same experience.

Now I know some would consider visual merchandising old-school. After all, it’s not as sexy as a pair of virtual reality goggles or as cutting edge as a robot.

But let’s be honest, most of those in-store tools are unproven to result in higher shopper conversions; they’re just new and popular topics of conversation.

As Tom Redd, VP at SAP recently said about such shiny objects, “In reality, today, real customers are not fitting into the mold created by these tech people and magazine articles that preach no stores and no clerks — Comic Con retail.”

But Visual merchandising 

It is a time-tested retail concept that focuses on enhancing the aesthetic appeal of a product or store to attract customers and increase sales. There are many tricks of the trade that retailers can use to optimize every square foot of a store.

Proper Lighting in incumbent - Lighting shapes the overall atmosphere of your store and helps draw a shopper’s attention to a particular item in a display. Like signage, it can elegantly guide the shopper to the areas of the store you want to highlight.

There are three techniques in lighting composition — primary lighting, accent lighting, and ambient lighting.

Primary lighting is the overall illumination of your store. Accent lighting draws the shopper’s focus to a specific display. Ambient lighting tends to be more dramatic in that it plays light off of shadow to create an intriguing effect.

-Andrei Wirth