Today we share the latest ideas emerging in Interior Design for commercial spaces. Visual merchandising for fashion is more alive than ever, as physical interactions are on the rise.
Visual Merchandising is linked to consumer emotion. Creating attractive visual elements in shopping environments is mandatory to capture the consumer’s attention. Visual Merchandising is a useful promotional tool in fashion retailing, as it helps to showcase information about the brand and products visually.
A detailed plan of Visual Merchandising enables keeping your brand differentiation at its best, sparkling brand awareness among your customers, and creating product atmospheres that balance the practical and emotional needs of your customer base.
Visual Merchandising can activate different behaviors in the customer, such as surprise, delight, product recognition, and hopefully purchasing.
According to authors Bailey and Baker on Visual Merchandising for Fashion, “the physical shopping experience is emphasized as being one of the most important platforms to visually market products”. One of the main objectives of Visual Merchandising is for the customer to spend as much time as possible in the store. A visual merchandiser can design the customer experience to attract, surprise, entertain and seduce the target customer.
Why Do We Implement a Visual Merchandising Strategy in a Store?
Here is a list of reasons why the visual presentation of a brand matters:
- To communicate visually the brand identity
- To increase brand recognition.
- To create the atmosphere of a new collection.
- To add impact and enjoyment to the in-store walls.
- To push a communication advertising campaign.
- To emotionally connect with the customer and simplify their shopping experience.
- To create immersive and highly engagement environments.
- To drive customer traffic to the store due to spectacular window-dressing.
- To increase sales by maximizing space and product display.
- To establish consistency between digital sales channels and the traditional store.
New Rules and Innovating Ideas in Visual Merchandising
1. From the Store to Social Media: Visuals Adapted for the Internet
Everybody knows that having a social media presence is imperative for any brand in the fashion and lifestyle businesses. Online visual merchandising relies on amazing photographs, attractive videos, and call-to-action messages to the customer.
For a curated visual merchandising experience in real life, the store is your operations base. Mix both worlds and blend them. When in mind a traffic strategy you can design a spectacular display that triggers your customer to immediately want to upload it to its social media.
Bold colors and textures, giant structures, and interactive “Instagrammable” photo-ready are the ones that work best.
2. Arty Displays: Elevated Visual Merchandising
When mixing visual merchandising and artistic references, you cannot go wrong. People love art expressions, paintings, structural-vibe displays, and over-the-top window dressings. As a brand, you should inspire them to come closer to your world. Music, theater, films, and contemporary aesthetics are some of the creative roads to explore.
Invite an artist to intervene in your store or window. Ask him to do something unique for your brand that is meant to catch your customer’s attention.
3. Upcycle Your Product Displays
Sustainability is not just a faded trend; it is a commitment. A new approach to visual merchandising is not only to recycle your prop materials but also to upcycled. Ask your creative team to reconsider what new uses and transformations of past visual merchandising materials in storage can be made. Reinvent your stands, racks, and display cases with second-hand products, transform them, think of unusual materials and make them work.
4. Colors as Trademark and a Back-to-Nature Approach
Some luxury fashion brands have been associated with a specific color to make it their hallmark. Shop walls, street windows, mannequins, and fitting rooms in a color block statement.
The return of massive plants and flower decoration in visual merchandising strategies is not a coincidence. Customers were craving nature, outdoor sensations, and a more natural mood environment.
5. Customers as Props and “Chillin’” Spaces
“See and be seen” in the “right” shops and fashionable streets is a trending idea. Turn your customer into your best sales claim. Allow your customer to enjoy your store, to sit down to have a coffee, or blend in with furniture to rest and socialize while shopping. The motto: “it is more than a store, it is a lifestyle”, has to be in the minds of the visual merchandising team. It is the big picture that matters in a store atmosphere.
The new rules of attractive visual merchandising are written continuously. You will need to stay current and unleash your imagination to keep your visual strategy forward-looking and competitive.
Do you want to learn more about this topic? Find more in the Visual Merchandising and Fashion Stylist program.