As the only place where the George brand is sold, one of ASDA’s main goals is to deliver a level of ‘inspiration and excitement’ for their legions of loyal shoppers.

But with hundreds of different sized stores across the UK, it becomes difficult to effectively plan their upcoming collections and merchandise in the same manner across each location.

A modernisation of their whole planning and visual merchandising process was therefore required in order to save time, money and deliver the right level of inspiration to their shoppers.

"We want to give them the level of inspiration and excitement that they require. However, that’s very difficult without technology to deliver that to 10,000 colleagues...and display it to the same way that we started out with when we did the design brief" says Mark Matthews, Senior Director Retail, Supply & Central Operations at ASDA George.

However, Matthews adds: “We found with the technology we were using at the time, we weren’t able to deliver that for every store.” meaning Visual Retailing's technology and expertise was sought after in order to keep things consistent - and most importantly, efficient.

A visual merchandising directive contains clear, concise information on how to merchandise products given a specific floor space. Everything from layout of the store furniture like gondolas to the placement of on-offer products is contained within. 

As a ‘fast-fashion’ brand, ASDA George creates a new store planogram and directive “Generally about every six weeks” according to Suzanne Reynolds, Head of Sales Development.

"Our role is essentially to brief store colleagues on how to merchandise product in the most simplistic way but also in the most commercial way to try and drive performance." says Michael Howard, Sales Development Manager at ASDA George.

However, ASDA George’s previous process - without Visual Retailing’s help - caused a variety of problems, not to mention a lot of wasted time. One big problem was the lack of ability to customise directives properly for their different sized stores.

“What we used to do was rack all of our products up in a large mock up store, walk around with the senior directors and get sign off for that process. We would then take pictures and brief our store colleagues on how we want to merchandise the products.” says Howard.

However, this fell down in the past as "stores would only receive a top store directive so the smaller stores and the mid stores found it very difficult" to interpret the information being sent from ASDA's VM HQ. 

It's crucial that visual merchandising directives contain only relevant information in order to avoid confusion and increase compliance - Visual Retailing's software not only makes this possible, it makes it easy. 

Step 1

Products for the 6 week phase are pulled out and photographed on the StyleShoots Horizontal machine.

Step 2

The StyleShoots machine instantly removes the background of the product for use in visual merchandising layouts and planograms.

Step 3

The images are then automatically sent to a folder where it links with Visual Retailing’s Range Plan software which has all of the product’s information in (description, identity, distribution etc).

Step 4

Range analysis is performed with ASDA/George's collection, making use of heatmaps and the highly visual layout.

Step 5

Once planning and range analysis is done, layouts for different grade levels of store can be created in a matter of minutes using MockShop.

Step 6

Buyers and merchandisers will then review the layouts to make sure they are happy and sign off from senior executives before sent to store for retail execution.

As well as delivering the directives quicker than ever before, Visual Retailing’s software also allows ASDA George to internally collaborate easier than ever. 

“If there’s an opportunity to do something different with the layout, we will mock it up on the Visual Retailing software” Howard gives as an example of the flexibility MockShop offers. 

Having the time to do things differently creates space for more brainstorming and ideation as Kate Bowler, Sales Development Coordinator explains:

“We can do a bit of a focus group and get some opinions going...you can do it all on your screen and because the image quality is so good you don’t need to mock it up in real life” 

Easier collaboration means teams can be more productive and creative - all helping to work towards ASDA George's main goal of delivering more inspiration and style to their shoppers. Higher sell-through and less markdown then comes naturally.