People from all over come to Brisbane for retail shopping therapy, but behind the scenes at all those clothing boutiques are teams of competitive and creative staff looking for strategies to bring in more customers and increase conversions. If you count yourself among their number, here are some visual merchandising tips to help you craft effective displays for your clothing store.
Target the ideal customer
Creating store displays isn’t a one-off task. You’ll soon learn that keeping appearances fresh makes them attractive to potential customers passing by. The boutiques around you are going to change things up with each season; it’s a tactic that’s been proven to work time and again.
Yet as you go about rearranging and redecorating your store in the space of a day, going back to the drawing board and planning for next season’s look, don’t lose sight of your ideal customer. Be creative, but always match your efforts to their lifestyle and interests.
Play with space
Retail stores usually want to maximise their space – to expose many products to the customer’s eye-level view, a horizontal or vertical stack is used. But packing shelves and racks with clothes makes interacting with the display a rather disorderly matter for the customer. They may end up not even wanting to take a product off the rack to try it on.
At the risk of not displaying all your products equally, play with space. Leave about a quarter or a third of your rack empty. If you’re using vertical stacks, you can pack lower levels and maintain good spacing at the eye level. You can also mix up the orientation – select one style out of a collection and display it facing front, as a showcase for the main features of the rest of the series.
Clothes in action
One of the strongest advantages of visual merchandising in retail stores is the ability actually to see your clothes as they would be worn. As shoppers flock every day to the outlets and malls of Brisbane, curating your mannequins to display a thoughtfully put-together outfit will constantly communicate your identity and draw in the customers you want.
Another tactic used to this effect would be having your store personnel dress up exclusively in the clothes you’re retailing. It expresses confidence in the product, offers an additional perk to your employees, and lets customers see them in everyday action.
Sensory experience
Despite the numbers pointing to the rapid growth of online shopping, retail stores offer an unmatched opportunity to engage all of the customer’s senses. For clothing stores, the ability to touch and feel the fabric, not to mention the convenience of trying on an item, is naturally the biggest advantages here.
Still, you can also look to leverage other senses. Lighting is mainly used to highlight products, but with a little effort, you can subtly craft a mood. Music can instantly convey associations with the desired lifestyle – whether it’s club music or laid-back jazz. Think of ways to incorporate sensory marketing into your next display and see how the results work out.
While there may be an endless variety of possibilities to explore for your retail store display, in the end, you might find it best to stay true to your ideal customer and constantly test and experiment within those bounds to refresh your display and drive up sales.
