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Merchandising casual furniture and accessories both in the showroom and on the retail floor is a challenge. For starters, comparing the low ceilings, drab flooring and bad lighting that can be found on show floors and in retail spaces with the natural beauty of spacious backyards, porches and poolside retreats where the furniture belongs is nearly impossible. Pair those larger problems with aging props, limited floor space and unoriginal vignettes, and show spaces can start to become as indistinguishable and uninviting as a used car lot.
“When you’re putting together things like displays, you have to keep it functional and beautiful, and on top of that, work within a budget and space allotment—that’s a challenge for anyone anywhere,” says Cesar Renero, a fabricator with Cain Cain Studio, a Brooklyn-based set and pop-up fabrication company that recently worked with Sunbrella to craft its booth at Casual Market Chicago.
But those difficulties can’t be used as an excuse for a bad setup, according to Renero. Whether you’re a fabrication studio like Cain Cain working with brands like Google, Adidas, Nike and Instagram on popups and displays, or a smaller operation, companies have to recognize the poor planning and bad design that can ruin a product display and store atmosphere.
“If things don’t work on a display, you don’t have an understanding of the space you have or you don’t meet brand expectations, then it’s floor space you wasted,” says Renero.
At Watson’s, Jennifer McLaughlin, the retailer’s vice president of merchandising, avoids that kind of retail floor disappointment when putting together the company’s displays by always keeping her ultimate goal in mind: keep customers around.
“A good visual merchandiser understands that the goal is to keep the customer shopping and to display products to highlight the features and benefits,” she says. “The longer a customer stays in the store, the more likely they are to make a purchase. As soon as a customer starts to think about something other than the products, such as having to walk around the store to avoid an obstacle or a dead-end, their train of thought has shifted, and they are no longer shopping.”
And while that might sound simple, McLaughlin says that instead of just placing product where it might be easiest at the moment, retailers and manufacturers alike should ask themselves some basic merchandising questions.
“What do you want the customer to see? Direct the customer’s attention using a focal point. Keep them engaged using exciting color palettes and patterns. Where do you want the customer to walk? Control the flow or direction with the product placement and scale. Space between vignettes is your friend and creates emphasis.”
At Watson’s, the retailer wants the customer to see product the way the store wants them to buy it, so they put out sets accordingly. Displays show stylized looks to build interest in custom orders. These displays also show product they have inventoried in the look and size they have available. To help with the aesthetics of the store, they keep point of purchase materials and signage clean and minimal, not wanting to create visual static that interferes with the product. And they give vignettes a defined look that doesn’t overwhelm the overall style of the store.
“The visual merchandising objective is to present the products in a way that grabs customers’ attention and inspires a customer to make a purchase,” says McLaughlin. “For the visual merchandising efforts to be successful, they have to be designed and created in support of the overall business strategy and marketing targets. The collaboration and communication on the company goals has to start at the beginning of the buying phase and continues throughout the entire process.”
For Sunbrella, that collaboration and communication is also a starting point for successfully merchandising its showrooms and booths.
“Our marketing, sales and design teams collaborate to decide on the message, emotion and tone that we’d like to create within the booth or showroom and the new collections we’d like to highlight,” says Esther Chang, design style manager for Sunbrella. “From there, we select the colors, textures and patterns to achieve that vision.”
When making those decisions, the company focuses on its audience, mixing and matching fabrics according to what it knows about the differences in things like its indoor versus outdoor customers. No matter the audience, though, the company always focuses on performance, functionality and texture because the tactile functions of the fabric are more important to their customers than ever.
“It comes down to understanding your audience and curating a variety of products that meet their needs,” says Chang. “Be mindful of all the components and pieces you are working with, whether it’s price point, pattern, color, or style, to make sure you’re pulling together the right story and range of product to fit the project.”
At Summer Classics Home, Lindsay McMullen Ryland, merchandising manager, describes the retailer’s visual team as “small but mighty.” The team, made up of about six people, is responsible for merchandising 14 locations across the country. For every refresh or store opening, they get the process started with a meeting at their corporate offices.
“We meet at a creative roundtable and bring our Pinterest photos, magazine pages, trend predictions and our brands’ newest furniture collections—we have Summer Classics, Gabby and Wendy Jane—that we intro resets for twice a year,” says Ryland. “We then decide what our main vignettes will be. Some are more elaborate than others.”
When Ryland says that, she means that some resets will incorporate a new wall color and new, more elaborate
props like 20 hanging paper lanterns, while others just get new fabric stories, rugs and accessories to complete its retheme.
One display Ryland says will always get a wow-worthy makeover during this process? The store’s main vignette or display.
“Make sure your first, main focal point is absolutely perfect,” says Ryland. “If you are perfect in executing what is going to wow your customers, then the not-soperfect areas in your store will be forgiven. If you focus all your energy on what you can make absolutely beautiful, that’s what your customers will leave thinking about.”
But how does the store accomplish that? Ryland says that her best tips come from a mix of merchandising tricks and a solid understanding of how her customers work.
“We use little tricks like the rule of three, making triangles with heights and placements, odd over even,” Ryland explains. “And most importantly, we layer height, umbrellas and bar tops in the floorplan so your eye goes from floor to ceiling and does not scan over a sea of furniture.”
Additionally, when accessorizing and finalizing layouts, Ryland says that she and her team are careful not to overcrowd, clutter or cover up the furniture and features they are selling. She notes that they never put props over umbrella holes or interesting table inlays, and they are even careful not to cover things like a sofa leg with a hanging blanket.
Using the information she and her team bring to their meetings beforehand, they also pull popular styling ideas for the vignettes from fashion magazines and feedback from folks in each location about what worked and what didn’t. She notes that this practice has taught the team a lot, helping them to learn things like which markets are open to pops of color and which prefer neutrals—a big deal because some customers “just can’t see past red” on cushions if they aren’t a red person.
“Our customers like for our merchandising to make it easier for them to purchase,” says Ryland. “If they have to see past a highly specific color palette, pattern or mix, or a cluttered environment in order to picture the sofa in their space, it makes the purchase decision harder. Make it easy—keep it simple, clean and pretty, and it will pay off.”
