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How to facilitate the Visual Merchandising of the future. Article 2/2
Standard & Strange by Emily Mills / CC BY-ND 2.0
This is the second article in a series of two concerning Visual Merchandising processes. The content of these articles is the outcome of a survey performed by interviewing 50 retailers throughout Europe:
- Current Challenges
- Opportunities for change
When it comes to Visual Merchandising, many retailers lag behind. As a consequence, communication remains one-way which has a negative effect on the day-to-day business.
Using old-fashioned visual merchandising tools is often a struggle. It’s not only that obsolete ways of communication are a real waste of time and money, but also missing possibilities to send feedback or show compliance are serious challenges. 26% of the interviewed retailers say they have an estimated level of waste of 10-15% per visual merchandising campaign. More than 42% of retailers have at least 100 stores, 12% in fact have more than 1.000. By sending out monthly VM guidelines and weekly updates to each store, numbers can move quickly into millions.
Not convinced yet? Think about having an average store size of 1,000-2,000 square meters, like 37% of retailers have; giving information to shop floor personnel immediately can be difficult. Moreover traditional printing and shipping of visual merchandising books multiplies the cost.
Switching to digital devices is definitely worth it!
As we all know every cloud has also a silver lining – it is time to take things into the hands. 25% of the retailers interviewed during our survey said they are currently upgrading their systems, whereas 47% plan to do this in the coming two years. However, 28% do not have plans yet. Hard to believe but lots of retailers still do not have Wi-Fi, Internet access or even a pc in store.
We asked current and prospective customers what they would expect from a new in-store system, especially about the features which should be offered by handheld devices such as iPhones or iPads. Mobility and real time information are the most important aspects.
The results from this survey strengthen our philosophy to excel in developing innovative tools to optimise retail execution processes.
Be inspired by our ideas and be one step ahead. Our goal is it to always address the needs of the international retail industry. Together with input from our Mockshop user group, we developed ShopShape. This handheld-device-based solution fulfils almost every requirement mentioned in the graph above.
Start today and innovate your stores!
Our product ShopShape is aimed to change the way retailers communicate between headquarters and shop-floors. Interested to learn how you could optimise your planogram production and measure store compliance?