Kissing two birds with the one set of lips.
By Natalie Coulter
Get yourself some retail inspiration from the numerous online social media platforms. Don’t know where to get your visual inspirations? Pinterest and Instagram are great go to visual inspirations.
- Inspiration for you
It’s important that each store finds it’s own inspiration. It’s fun to know what’s on trend. You will be amazed how you can translate colour and image trends into your store. For inspiration and trends let’s start with knowing Patone’s colour of the year for 2016. Named Rose Quartz and Serenity, these colours together or separate have flooded the market across fashion, home wares, décor and more. Even Vespa has their own Rose Quartz and Serenity coloured bikes on the road.
Given the popularity of these colours, look at the product in your store and highlight these items, showcasing them at the front of the store with like merchandising. In other words group like product with like product.
Another visual trend for 2016 is the rise of the green (I’m talking all things palm trees and potted plants). In your displays, find a way to weave a bit of this trend into the mix.
- Show the product
Mix up displays regularly. Create a timetable for display changeovers. If you are without a VM person in store, give your creative staff the responsibility to style mannequins, forms and shelving to promote product. Customers need to see product and changing the displays is one of the simplest ways to ‘show’ what’s in. Let the displays be the silent salesperson. Remember style like with like and show customers ways of wearing your product. Staff wearing product is also a perfect opportunity to silently sell what’s new.
- Celebrate the store’s styling, VM and new product
Your Instagram page is another way of letting customers know what product is in your store. Personalize your page and develop your own style. Photograph the styling changes and any VM installations that have been changed. If you have an MIT table, photograph the table as it is in display. Create some flat-lays from the product (composition is everything for flat-lays and sometimes less is more). Be creative with your composition and pay particular attention to focus the product. If the product in store looks particularly great on one member of your team photograph it on body. For anonymity you can crop the photo to show body and product only.
Find hashtags for social media that best suit your product! #setgoals #flatlay #bikinis #retail #VM #display #boardshorts #etc #enjoy @belleflaneur
- Work with what you’ve got
Once you tap into working with what you’ve got a whole new world will open up.
All of a sudden you see opportunities for display and follow through into social media platforms. Find an area in your store that you can regularly curate product for photos. This same wall can act as a display wall for hanging product or obscure eclectic props. Your customers will love the change on this wall and come to expect something special and a bit different every time they look to see what’s up now. These in store creative points can also become a talking point as they offer an opportunity to share your love of objects and collectables with the customers.
As seen in Anthropologies hose installation. This display on this wall changes regularly. To mix this up, product could also be added to the prop and used as a display point for product before changing over the hose for something else. Any time you add a piece of wall prop; find a way to showcase a product on it.
“Above all else, take photos of everything and select the best for your social media platforms.”
The ideas listed above can be snapped and posted thus kissing two birds with the one set of lips. (You get a great looking retail store plus product exposure on your social media page).
Natalie Coulter runs a Visual Merchandising business Belle Flaneur. Here she runs workshops for retail, has a display team and a property with props for hire.
