January 14, 2008
NRF: Designing the Anti-Web Store
By Tom Ryan
A visit to the NRF Design Studio at the association’s annual convention and expo in New York City reveals that many of retail’s freshest design ideas are being inspired by the web, or more correctly, creating a store experience that’s far richer than the web experience. According to presenting design firms, social interaction, entertainment, and convenience are some advantages stores should focus on in design to compete with a rapidly improving online shopping experience.
In some cases, suppliers will have to help. While apparel vendors have long been funding in-store shops at department stores, CPG manufacturers are increasingly helping create and fund store design as part of category management initiatives.
“What’s really changing is the origin of the design,” said John Wilkins, VP of retail strategy at Millerzell. His firm is working with 10 CPG clients.
Mike Pothast, director of new business development at Design Forum, likewise said his firm is doing a lot of analytic work around consumer insights with CPG suppliers. “We’ll help them develop a concept for shelf sets, for example, and they’ll present it to the retailer with the goal of driving sales across the overall category as well as their own brand,” said Mr. Pothast.
But an overall design theme, according to Mr. Pothhast, is emphasizing convenience for both “time-starved” customers and as an advantage over the web. For instance, some stores are moving products such as milk and orange juice to cases in the front of the store from the back of the store.
Mr. Wilkins sees cleaner stores and increased shopper engagement, or “trying to get them to touch and try, get some interaction,” as some bigger design trends.
In the same vein, Simon Graj, principal at Graj + Gustavsen, said the future of store design will be more and more focused on experiences, with product being secondary. Two examples of the future of store design are Apple Stores and Starbucks, which each combine social and entertainment aspects in a non-sales-like environment.
A major effort will be around family entertainment, both making the stores more exciting and shopping less of a chore. “With all these racks and things, right now we have to work too hard to spend our money in stores,” says Mr. Graj.
A second factor driving design, according to Mr. Graj, is “good for you” products, whether healthy food or other like offerings. The third is contextual shopping, where profiling is key.
“Context is the content,” said Graj. “The shopper has to walk into the store and find a profile that fits them. They need to say ‘This is who I am,’ and also envision what they dream they can be.”
JGA is also helping stores and vendors create more “experiences,” including pop-up stores and bigger events. On the other side, JGA reworked Brookstone’s website to where consumers can simulate navigating an actual store down to the aisles and shelves.
“Instead of making the store replicate the web, you’re having the web replicate the store,” said Ken Hirsch, chairman at JGA.
Discussion Question: In what ways can store design become a true differentiator for brick & mortars versus the online shopping experience? On the other hand, do you think CPG manufacturers should be increasingly creating and funding store design?
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The Web is impacting how consumers–especially younger shoppers, for whom the Web is something that’s always been there–expect retail to behave. To the extent that drives brick-and-mortars to be more responsive, that’s good.
But to the extent that you have retailers fighting against their same-chain online counterparts, that’s bad.
Stores have always had the touch, look and experience advantage while online had the inventory, information-depth and convenience advantage. Speed sort of was a split ticket, with the Web faster at getting to a order completion, but the local store had the advantage in getting product into the customer’s hands more quickly.
Many retailers now see the mobile phone as the brick-and-mortar’s great equalizer. By either having the phone interact with something in the store (such as Sears’ 2-D barcode trial) or by having phone communication require an in-store action (such as Wal-Mart’s text message to cellphone to tell customers of one-hour sales trial), the store can make the physical store relevant again for those who crave the Web’s information.
A store experience that’s “far richer than the web experience” was invented some years ago. It’s called Chuck E. Cheese and features Nolan Bushnell’s famous animatronic characters (Nolan, you’ll remember, invented “Pong,” the first video game). But things change. After all, the Chuck E. Cheese character began as a rat and eventually metamorphosed into a tailless mouse. Perhaps the popularity of the Pixar feature, “Ratatouille,” will reap retro rathood respectability for Chuck E. (After all, according to Rickie Lee Jones, “Chuck E’s In Love,” and everyone loves a lover – but I digress in serial fashion.)
There is a significantly positive future for b&m retailers that choose to differentiate their customers’ shopping experiences through store design, but not through their own design efforts. Instead, they’ll call on the services of “module designers” to create unique spaces in their stores. These are companies that are several notches above trade show booth designers and kiosk engineers, who create custom spaces inside existing retail stores. Circuit City wanted a special zone in their stores for customers sampling electronics, so they hired an outside company to do it. Wal-Mart wanted a reliable, healthy, affordable, in-store meal offering, so they called Subway.
These services are called “plonkers,” because they “plonk” appropriate designer modules down into retail stores. And that’s becoming the nature of retail more than ever before. In true Sim City fashion, b&m stores are amalgams of plonked modules. Fragrances were instrumental in the early days of this trend, unless you count the countless small branded shops inside Harrod’s. Levi’s departments, Apple Computer departments, Heinz soup departments; all are plonkers. Even in hairdressing salons the individual cutters plonk their personal business models into leased spaces.
The lesson learned: Don’t try to do it yourself, retailers. Hire outsiders. And, keep your options open and your plonking spaces uniform in size but fluid in movement. If one concept from an outside supplier doesn’t work or works but grows tired, change it. Again, use the trade show mentality for booth use, cost, and placement.
In other words, contrary to Mark Lilien’s opinion, the best retailers do NOT design their own stores. The experiential requirements of today’s retail world makes it functionally impossible.
During this Christmas season, I often found myself on a New York City bus, inching down Fifth Avenue or up Madison as I commuted back and forth to my office. Between the Abercrombie store with its crowd-gathering events, the American Girl mecca visited by girl-mother-aunt-adult-female-friend packs, FAO Schwarz’s perennial line snaking around the block, and mobbed store windows, I have to assert that brick and mortar retail is about the experience.
Yes, you can have fun browsing around and shopping online too. Occasionally I get sucked into a beautiful web purchasing experience. Cosmetic companies have done an especially good job in recent years bringing the experience online. But, really, online is about efficiency. Stores, as the article above suggests, must incorporate a whole system of experiential elements to make the visit about something more than just a purchase.
Sampling a product and experiencing excitement or demand for a product or service are not possible via the web. Brick and mortar establishments have the aforementioned advantages over the web.
However, the future of brick and mortar locations–as well as the focus, should be on the complement between web and tangible stores. The article mentions the Apple Store as the future, but it fails to address how Apple’s website is an extension of the store and vice versa. The ability to market, gain new customers, grow loyalty, and drive traffic to a locale is enhanced by utilizing both approaches.
There simply is no substitute for store experience. As an example, think of the feeling you get when you walk into an Abercrombie store…impossible to translate that online.
To me, Apple has executed the perfect line-up of physical logic when it comes to the “dos & don’ts” of retail design in their stores: attractive windows, clear visibility into the space, simple navigation with beautiful lifestyle graphics, products you can touch and use to your heart’s delight, perfect lighting levels, brand-right materials palette, but most importantly–PEOPLE TO TALK TO–who are knowledgeable, easy to talk to and willing to go to any end to satisfy you.
Apple ‘gets’ the fact that the winning element for retailers now and going forward is the ability to talk to a person while looking at the product! And their stores are designed to make that interaction easy (witness the genius bar).
Sounds rudimentary, but really, you can’t compete with live customer service, and stores need to be designed to help that interaction happen.
I like the thought, “the future of store design will be more and more focused on experiences, with product being secondary.” This is a major step in the direction we have been advocating since we learned how little the products contributed to the in-store experience in 2001. And I agree that experience at the shelf (and with in-person humans) can be a permanent advantage of the bricks-and-mortar retailer.
What is being given short shrift here is the massive focus online in terms of the shopper’s navigation of the site. Until offline retailers get as serious about studying shoppers’ paths as online retailers are, they are giving up crucial offline competitive advantage with both their offline and online competitors. Eventually, some offline retailer will get permanently serious about the in-store “clickstream” and a paradigm shift will be the likely outcome.
The best retailers design their own stores. They don’t look to their suppliers to do that for them. When a retailer designs their own stores, their opportunity for a consistent positioning and experience is excellent. Bloomingdale’s has private label apparel as well as brand name apparel. The clothing is displayed by brand, and the different brands each have a distinctive decor. Yet there are consistent themes and standards throughout. It doesn’t feel like a hodgepodge of bazaar tents all clashing with each other.
The key elements of good retail design, in my opinion, are those that trigger activation, engagement and experience. If you study how shoppers participate in those key areas, you learn how important the sensory elements are in the process.
Adapting retail stores to deliver on sensory while not inconveniencing shoppers and adding to time stress is the goal. It matters not who does the work, retailer or design firm. It matters most if it is tested and real shopper input is gathered and incorporated into the plan.
Anyone who wanted to see the state of the art in store design only needed to go to the Institute of Store Planners’ (recently renamed Retail Design Institute) 37th Annual International Store Design Ceremony held at the new Times Center Building in NYC. Entries from over 20 countries showed the best innovative thinking on the store experience…much better than any web experience.
Similarly, in the loft space known as The Studio, NRF’s showcase of the best retail designers on the planet,displays, portfolio reviews, and a series of exciting talks were given by these experts on how to design stores that cater to how customers like to shop.
I’m proud of the heritage and not-tied-to-traditional-thinking that these companies and design firms accomplished in 2007. It can be expected that even greater breakthroughs will be accomplished as we head into this year of uncertainty.
Customers are social and experiential like all the rest of us. It’s not enough to sit at home in front of a computer and click away, as much as we are increasingly doing it. Customers have and will likely always respond to compelling retail stores.
This is really all about branding. The most successful retailers will be those that have successfully branded themselves. By their very name customers understand what they’re all about.
I agree that convenience and experience are key competitive trends. The retailer who most epitomizes convenience in the way they have branded themselves is Staples–and the Easy button. And convenience drives everything they’ve done, from store locations, to store design and layout, to assortments and merchandising. Two retailers come to mind when thinking about experience, Build-A-Bear and Bass Pro Shops. Build-A-Bear is an ultimate interactive experience for kids, and, I might add not the least bit sheepishly, adults as well. And Bass Pro Shops are nothing less than a theme park inside a store, with ‘attractions’ for every age. It is the state of the art in destination positioning.
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The Web is impacting how consumers–especially younger shoppers, for whom the Web is something that’s always been there–expect retail to behave. To the extent that drives brick-and-mortars to be more responsive, that’s good.
But to the extent that you have retailers fighting against their same-chain online counterparts, that’s bad.
Stores have always had the touch, look and experience advantage while online had the inventory, information-depth and convenience advantage. Speed sort of was a split ticket, with the Web faster at getting to a order completion, but the local store had the advantage in getting product into the customer’s hands more quickly.
Many retailers now see the mobile phone as the brick-and-mortar’s great equalizer. By either having the phone interact with something in the store (such as Sears’ 2-D barcode trial) or by having phone communication require an in-store action (such as Wal-Mart’s text message to cellphone to tell customers of one-hour sales trial), the store can make the physical store relevant again for those who crave the Web’s information.
A store experience that’s “far richer than the web experience” was invented some years ago. It’s called Chuck E. Cheese and features Nolan Bushnell’s famous animatronic characters (Nolan, you’ll remember, invented “Pong,” the first video game). But things change. After all, the Chuck E. Cheese character began as a rat and eventually metamorphosed into a tailless mouse. Perhaps the popularity of the Pixar feature, “Ratatouille,” will reap retro rathood respectability for Chuck E. (After all, according to Rickie Lee Jones, “Chuck E’s In Love,” and everyone loves a lover – but I digress in serial fashion.)
There is a significantly positive future for b&m retailers that choose to differentiate their customers’ shopping experiences through store design, but not through their own design efforts. Instead, they’ll call on the services of “module designers” to create unique spaces in their stores. These are companies that are several notches above trade show booth designers and kiosk engineers, who create custom spaces inside existing retail stores. Circuit City wanted a special zone in their stores for customers sampling electronics, so they hired an outside company to do it. Wal-Mart wanted a reliable, healthy, affordable, in-store meal offering, so they called Subway.
These services are called “plonkers,” because they “plonk” appropriate designer modules down into retail stores. And that’s becoming the nature of retail more than ever before. In true Sim City fashion, b&m stores are amalgams of plonked modules. Fragrances were instrumental in the early days of this trend, unless you count the countless small branded shops inside Harrod’s. Levi’s departments, Apple Computer departments, Heinz soup departments; all are plonkers. Even in hairdressing salons the individual cutters plonk their personal business models into leased spaces.
The lesson learned: Don’t try to do it yourself, retailers. Hire outsiders. And, keep your options open and your plonking spaces uniform in size but fluid in movement. If one concept from an outside supplier doesn’t work or works but grows tired, change it. Again, use the trade show mentality for booth use, cost, and placement.
In other words, contrary to Mark Lilien’s opinion, the best retailers do NOT design their own stores. The experiential requirements of today’s retail world makes it functionally impossible.
During this Christmas season, I often found myself on a New York City bus, inching down Fifth Avenue or up Madison as I commuted back and forth to my office. Between the Abercrombie store with its crowd-gathering events, the American Girl mecca visited by girl-mother-aunt-adult-female-friend packs, FAO Schwarz’s perennial line snaking around the block, and mobbed store windows, I have to assert that brick and mortar retail is about the experience.
Yes, you can have fun browsing around and shopping online too. Occasionally I get sucked into a beautiful web purchasing experience. Cosmetic companies have done an especially good job in recent years bringing the experience online. But, really, online is about efficiency. Stores, as the article above suggests, must incorporate a whole system of experiential elements to make the visit about something more than just a purchase.
Sampling a product and experiencing excitement or demand for a product or service are not possible via the web. Brick and mortar establishments have the aforementioned advantages over the web.
However, the future of brick and mortar locations–as well as the focus, should be on the complement between web and tangible stores. The article mentions the Apple Store as the future, but it fails to address how Apple’s website is an extension of the store and vice versa. The ability to market, gain new customers, grow loyalty, and drive traffic to a locale is enhanced by utilizing both approaches.
There simply is no substitute for store experience. As an example, think of the feeling you get when you walk into an Abercrombie store…impossible to translate that online.
To me, Apple has executed the perfect line-up of physical logic when it comes to the “dos & don’ts” of retail design in their stores: attractive windows, clear visibility into the space, simple navigation with beautiful lifestyle graphics, products you can touch and use to your heart’s delight, perfect lighting levels, brand-right materials palette, but most importantly–PEOPLE TO TALK TO–who are knowledgeable, easy to talk to and willing to go to any end to satisfy you.
Apple ‘gets’ the fact that the winning element for retailers now and going forward is the ability to talk to a person while looking at the product! And their stores are designed to make that interaction easy (witness the genius bar).
Sounds rudimentary, but really, you can’t compete with live customer service, and stores need to be designed to help that interaction happen.
I like the thought, “the future of store design will be more and more focused on experiences, with product being secondary.” This is a major step in the direction we have been advocating since we learned how little the products contributed to the in-store experience in 2001. And I agree that experience at the shelf (and with in-person humans) can be a permanent advantage of the bricks-and-mortar retailer.
What is being given short shrift here is the massive focus online in terms of the shopper’s navigation of the site. Until offline retailers get as serious about studying shoppers’ paths as online retailers are, they are giving up crucial offline competitive advantage with both their offline and online competitors. Eventually, some offline retailer will get permanently serious about the in-store “clickstream” and a paradigm shift will be the likely outcome.
The best retailers design their own stores. They don’t look to their suppliers to do that for them. When a retailer designs their own stores, their opportunity for a consistent positioning and experience is excellent. Bloomingdale’s has private label apparel as well as brand name apparel. The clothing is displayed by brand, and the different brands each have a distinctive decor. Yet there are consistent themes and standards throughout. It doesn’t feel like a hodgepodge of bazaar tents all clashing with each other.
The key elements of good retail design, in my opinion, are those that trigger activation, engagement and experience. If you study how shoppers participate in those key areas, you learn how important the sensory elements are in the process.
Adapting retail stores to deliver on sensory while not inconveniencing shoppers and adding to time stress is the goal. It matters not who does the work, retailer or design firm. It matters most if it is tested and real shopper input is gathered and incorporated into the plan.
Anyone who wanted to see the state of the art in store design only needed to go to the Institute of Store Planners’ (recently renamed Retail Design Institute) 37th Annual International Store Design Ceremony held at the new Times Center Building in NYC. Entries from over 20 countries showed the best innovative thinking on the store experience…much better than any web experience.
Similarly, in the loft space known as The Studio, NRF’s showcase of the best retail designers on the planet,displays, portfolio reviews, and a series of exciting talks were given by these experts on how to design stores that cater to how customers like to shop.
I’m proud of the heritage and not-tied-to-traditional-thinking that these companies and design firms accomplished in 2007. It can be expected that even greater breakthroughs will be accomplished as we head into this year of uncertainty.
Customers are social and experiential like all the rest of us. It’s not enough to sit at home in front of a computer and click away, as much as we are increasingly doing it. Customers have and will likely always respond to compelling retail stores.
This is really all about branding. The most successful retailers will be those that have successfully branded themselves. By their very name customers understand what they’re all about.
I agree that convenience and experience are key competitive trends. The retailer who most epitomizes convenience in the way they have branded themselves is Staples–and the Easy button. And convenience drives everything they’ve done, from store locations, to store design and layout, to assortments and merchandising. Two retailers come to mind when thinking about experience, Build-A-Bear and Bass Pro Shops. Build-A-Bear is an ultimate interactive experience for kids, and, I might add not the least bit sheepishly, adults as well. And Bass Pro Shops are nothing less than a theme park inside a store, with ‘attractions’ for every age. It is the state of the art in destination positioning.