The layout and types of retail displays will differ from one retail industry to the next, so we'll cover the most common retail display types that can be adapted to suit your business needs.
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We’ve divided them into:
Get inspired by these real-life visual merchandising examples, which will put you in the mood to experiment.
Standalone or point-of-purchase (POP) displays are off-shelf displays designed to attract customers to a particular set of products in your store. They either hold or are closely placed near the items that require more attention.
Here are the types of display in visual merchandising for standalone and POP store fixtures you can choose from.
Freestanding displays are portable racks designed to draw attention to specific brands that would otherwise go unnoticed. The size of these displays is typically at eye level with shoppers.
Freestanding visual merchandising displays are perfect for those who sell a variety of products like specialty stores.
To maximize this retail display, place them in high-traffic spots that don’t impede the customer flow. Green Spoon Sales, an organic retail store, uses this type of retail display to increase visibility and sales for this specific brand.
Dump bins hold smaller, non-breakable items, such as stuffed animals, snack items, and more. These containers are also less organized and easier to maintain.
You’ll often see this type of retail display housing, and sale items on big-box stores like Walmart.
Use dump bins to get rid of your slow-moving items or to encourage extra purchases of new products. Position them anywhere near the counter or next to the aisles to ensure that all customers can run into them.
You can also add themes and display them as a focal point. Schnucks, a grocery retailer, does exactly that to encourage sales during Halloween. See their pumpkin display below:
The storefront is your retail display’s hotspot because that's the customers' first point of contact with your shop. It’s also your key to attracting more visits, especially if you have competitors nearby.
Use your best-sellers, time-limited promos, or seasonal items as the subject of your entryway displays and put them on a tiny table near the doorway. Add outdoor designs like benches and mirrors if feasible.
Check out these outdoor display techniques from The White Stitch, a women's clothing boutique, to woo passersby with their discounted items.
Window displays are an assortment of products, fixtures, and decors placed right next to the store window. These display techniques are a silent marketer, especially for those who are new to your brand.
Follow a theme, add lighting, create a focal point, and ensure balance (a.k.a. avoid too much clutter!) on your window displays. The overall design also has to match your target buyers' preferences.
Here, Chalk Hills Bakery's window displays reflect their indoor visual merchandising displays. It's a clever way to extend their brand message to whoever wanders around their bakeshop’s corner.
If a traditional POP display can already influence the buyers' purchasing decisions, then a digital one can surely offer more. These visual merchandising displays use digital media to advertise products, typically among electronic stores.
With this retail display, you can let the looping digital signage or product video do the selling for you. All you have to do is place the LCD media players near or on the shelves (if they aren’t built-in) where the customers usually go.
Meanwhile, the Amazon Salon in UK redefined the beauty salon retail with this augmented-reality app that lets customers try different hair styles and colors.
Banner displays can be standees, ceiling, or pole banners used to announce promotions or new product releases. It's a retail display that’s flexible for both inside and outside the store, so almost every shopping mall retail outlet has them.
In outsourcing your banners, look for a durable, weather-resistant material to maximize them for long-term use. Use the appropriate colors to attract and spark your buyers’ interest.
For your reference, here’s a sales promo banner from a Barnes & Noble bookstore outlet.
Preparing a display table is one of the most versatile types of retail displays. It only requires a retail table, a set of products you want to highlight, and a knack for display techniques. They’re most common in specialty stores, especially for accessory and apparel brands.
Your retail tables must meet the buyer's eye level, so ideally, they should be at least 4ft. to 5ft. Experiment with your visual merchandising displays, but don't forget to rework them from time to time.
You won’t run out of design ideas for this because you can always follow seasonal themes. Same here with The Alphabet Gift Shop who cross-sells their items based on the occasion. In this case, a Father’s day table display.
Another versatile retail display is the use of portable gondola displays for items of mixed sizes. It can be single-sided, two-sided, or even round-sided. It can maximize a small space making it fitting for hardware and pet stores.
Add hanging pegs and hooks to make the most of your gondola. For shelving up diverse products, try to follow these neat display techniques made by a local pet shop, Puppies & Kittens.
Immersive displays aim to connect personally with your customers. And it’s becoming more feasible today now that the retail industry is closely approaching the full-world alternate reality a.k.a. the metaverse. Nike, for instance, created an immersive 3D world called Nikeland that comes to life at Nike’s House of Innovation in NYC.
The immersive displays can be techy or just simple ornaments depending on the industry. A clothing store can invest in virtual fitting rooms, while a restaurant can simply enhance its store ambiance.
Simply relate your brand story to how customers are using the products in their daily lives. For your inspiration, here's a chocolate retail shop called Tallipihan Suklaapuoti.
Look at how the store decors turn their traditional sweet shop into a hidden winter wonderland. That's immersive visual merchandising displays doing the magic!
Apparently, the best visual merchandising displays don't end with the off-shelf standalone fixtures. So for these next types of retail displays, let’s proceed to the store shelves must-haves.
In contrast to standalone and POP, shelving displays stay right on or next to the store shelves. These types of retail display help customers with in-store navigation and product browsing.
Use any of the following visual merchandising displays to jazz up your store shelves.
Browsing in a specific aisle doesn't guarantee that the customers will find interest in a specific product. But you can let shelf talkers do the sales talk. These display techniques are famous among grocery stores to show off the best product options.
To make the tags visible across the aisle, ensure that they're placed perpendicular to the shelves. Don't forget to use bright colors as well to improve readability.
Here's a great example of sticking shelf talkers from Schnucks' grocery outlet.
Another sticking retail display you can add to your shelves is a clip strip. Clip strips are metal or plastic strips used in advertising several small items without occupying too much shelf space. Because of the limited area in convenience stores, you can usually see these visual merchandising displays lingering around the shop.
Cross-sell using your clip strips by placing them near their complementary products. For example, you can place a strip of shaving razors in the hygiene section. Otherwise, put them on a shelf near the counter to stimulate your shoppers’ impulse buying tendencies.
US Market, a convenience store installed in a petrol station, makes the most out of its shelf by clipping snacks in this example:
Header cards are creative labels placed on shelves to highlight a particular set of products. The print on this retail display can include brand logos, how-to product guides, or exclusive redeemable perks. Most outlets with a diverse product mix employ these display techniques, such as hypermarkets.
Header cards have to attract attention, so they must be simple yet creative. Use this to showcase what sets your products apart from your competitors.
Here's how Whole Foods Market, an organic food retail store, uses header cards to emphasize their brand advocacy (i.e., selling local and organic products).
Glorifiers are tiny platforms that give a specific product a striking visual appeal. You can set these visual merchandising displays on a store shelf, on a countertop rack, or on a separate table next to the shelf that contains similar items.
These types of retail displays are ideal for advertising shoes, eyeglasses, and bottled products. Note that not all items need a glorifier, so determine which only among your products has to be set apart.
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In this example, Héritage Berbère Marrakech only spotlights this particular scent from their entire perfume collection.
End caps retail display refers to the racks positioned at the two endpoints of every aisle in your store. They're high-traffic spots because customers always pass through them as they browse around. So might want to show off your promos and discounted items there to increase their purchases.
To get more favorable results, prioritize stocking up complementary products that are suitable for cross-selling. Be creative in shelving them up.
Erewhon, healthy food retail, has compiled all of those display techniques in this example—promotions, cross-selling, and creativity.
The displays above are often used by retail businesses in the food and beverage industry. But for these last three types of display in visual merchandising, we’ll be focusing on retail clothing and furniture outlets.
The off-shelf and on-shelf displays above already apply to clothing products. For furniture, however, that’s a different story. Nevertheless, you can even level them up by using display techniques that are specifically designed for them.
So if your business falls into either of the two categories, check out these types of retail displays to help you boost your sales.
Mannequins allow customers to picture how various items would look on them. Talk about advertising without even talking to your prospective buyers—that's a visual strategy.
Putting mannequins in your window displays can increase store traffic according to a study. So ensure that they’re the first thing your customers see when they enter the store by placing them on eye-level areas.
Style them with the right amount of clothes and accessories and don’t overdo it. Look at the balance of this women's fashion retail display from Tally-Ho.
The clothes and accessories you don't put in your mannequins, you can still place aesthetically on garment racks. These racks come in various shapes, colors, and sizes, so only use those that match your store design.
Pro-tip: Apply color display techniques and use uniform hangers in a single rack.
Here’s another example from Tally-Ho. Observe how they style the garment rack by symmetrically grouping and placing the clothes in order. Aesthetically pleasing, right?
If food stores offer free tastes and clothing outlets have fitting rooms, then furniture shops have try displays. It's an opportunity for customers to touch, feel, and test the quality of the actual furniture.
The sense of touch is so important in fabric retail to bring customers a 100% cognitive experience of the product. Furniture is a long-term investment, after all, so they have the right to know that what they're purchasing is really worth it.
Below, you can see how Tides Home & Garden’s interior showroom use their retail display to personalize the customer experience.
With ever-increasing, fierce online competition, it’s never been more important for high street retailers to give plenty of thought to their window displays. A quality, eye-catching retail window display can turn a passer-by into a paying customer, so it’s vital that displays are attractive enough to invite someone inside. Window displays are one of the most effective marketing tools that a retailer has at hand, so read on to find out more about the best ways to use them.
Window displays have the power to turn anyone who passes a shop into a customer. With a well-thought-out, inviting design, a window display could cause a passer-by to turn and enter your shop, where they may ordinarily have walked past without a second thought.
As well as attracting customers and generating more foot traffic, a retail window display should be considered important for other reasons;
The window display of a shop provides passers-by with a visual snapshot into what the shop is about. Not only what is sold there, but also the general style and atmosphere.
Effective window displays can be created whether a shop has minimal window space, or generous glass-fronted walls. The trick is to make the most of the space you have, without overcrowding the display. It’s important for the display to be digestible; that is, every item should be visible. Some different kinds of window display include:
Visual merchandisers who are trained in the art of window displays are taught various tips and tricks to make the most out of a shop’s window space. The aim is to invite in more customers, promote products/services and increase brand awareness.
Brand awareness methods can be brazen and obvious, or subtle and tapping into the subconscious. This means that to ensure a window display works to increase brand awareness, it must display both bold company logos and more understated visuals. The latter of these could be by using brand colours, font, or any symbols and imagery that are consistent with the brand.
Example: A homeware shop that traditionally uses comforting images and tones, like neutral colours and tartan patterns, would not want to suddenly incorporate bright and bold cartoon imagery. This would be completely out of sync with their brand and would not serve to support customers’ awareness of the company.
Another focus of a retailer’s window display is often to promote a specific product or service that they wish to sell more of. Whether this is in line with a wider marketing campaign, or a one-off instance for a small business, there are different things that can be done to help in the promotion. This involves making that product or service the primary focus in the display in various ways;
If the main goal of the display is simply to attract more visitors to the shop, there are a number of methods to try.
After seeing a window display, if a customer then wants to enter it’s usually because something has caught their attention. This could be one item or offer, or a whole collection that they like the look of. If you know you have one particular selling point, whether this is an exceptionally good deal or discount, or an item that you know sells out quickly, make sure this is obvious in your display.
Other welcoming tactics include the clever use of colour. Warm tones such as yellow, orange and red are considered to be inviting, whereas cooler colours like white, blue, and green are calming. This can be applied to what you are selling. For example, if you are promoting a beach holiday use calm tones, or if you have an autumn/winter clothing collection, opt for warmer colours. Not forgetting to incorporate brand logos, fonts, and colours where suitable.
In addition to considering the main goal you want to achieve with your shop window display, there are a few other things to keep in mind to help its effectiveness.
Even though most people seem to be moving across to a more virtual world, there is still plenty of space for the high street and its retailers. The fact is, customers still enjoy wandering past shops and looking at window displays, which is why it’s so important to use these as the valuable marketing tool they are. An attractive, well-thought-out retail window display that presents just a handful of products or services, while maintaining brand stylistics, will have multiple benefits. These include the likely increase of foot traffic as well as leaving viewers with a memorable impression of your business.
Your shop window displays will likely be the first interaction your customer has with your brand. It’s a make or break moment – you have a split second to convince them to stop, look for longer, and make the decision to come into your store. So, how can you use window dressing to boost the impact your store has on the high street? Below are 7 tips on how to dress a shop window…
In the past, window displays tended to barricade a shop window with shelving or backing, but the trend is now for displays to be open to the shop behind them so that customers can see inside. Psychologically, a customer who doesn’t know your store is more likely to come inside if they can see what to expect in advance. Displays at waist height or with strategic gaps can achieve this while still leaving scope for product display.
This fashion retailer’s display uses designs applied directly to the window to give a block colour effect to match the product, while still revealing the shop interior.
Well-known destination stores can get away with not explicitly using product in their window – fashion brand Anthropologie is famous for its creative window displays, which often don’t feature clothes or mannequins at all. But if you’re a smaller independent, you need to signal to that person on the pavement who doesn’t know your store what they can expect when they come inside – and why they would want to.
This window display for the Cath Kidston store in Cambridge shows a range of products available instore. They’re displayed simply but creatively in painted packing boxes to increase visual impact. The boxes also emphasise the gift focus of the brand.
You don’t need a big budget to make an impact with your window. Use your existing products cleverly and think about colours and shapes – pick a colour scheme for the window to create a unified design and use shape to draw the eye to a focal point. The patisserie window display (see main article image above) in Paris allows people to see into the shop while the colours suggest luxury. The central pyramid of macaroons draws the eye.
One easy way of making a visual impact is to group lots of the same product together in the window. Sticking in one of everything you sell will give a jumble-sale effect; instead, draw attention to a key product by repeating it. In this window display at cosmetics retailer Lush, bath products are grouped in piles to give colour and shape impact.
The window displays at flagship stores like Selfridges, Harrods and Fortnum & Mason in London are world-famous for their drama and lavish design. These big players have a store design team and a substantial budget dedicated to their windows. There’s no reason a smaller independent can’t take inspiration from the drama they use to create the effect. This could mean:
If your products are small (jewellery, cosmetics, electronics etc.) it can be hard to create an impact even by grouping similar products. Instead, consider using creative display stands to build structure and visual drama. This window display at a cosmetics store uses different sized logs to display small products, also hinting at the natural ingredients used in the range.
If your business doesn’t have products that lend themselves to an attractive display you can still use window dressing to attract customer attention. Think creatively about how your windows could say something about your brand. This display at a branch of Hampton’s estate agents was installed to celebrate Chelsea in Bloom . It’s bright, eye-catching, and the combination of wellies and country flowers sends a message about the type of customer the agent is appealing to.
“Patisserie Window”: Model In Training
“Pine Cones Window”: FlowerShopStories.blogspot.co.uk
“Cosmetics Shop Window”: Instagram
“Cath Kidston Window”: Julia Jepps
“Fashion Window”: Melinda Pollard
“Lush Window”: Ellen Masters
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