Visual Displays Tutorial

Visual displays can become ineffective if you find yourself using the same ideas over and over. Customers and employees can easily tire of a display, no matter how wonderful it was to begin with. Your visuals should give life to your store, inspire your customers, and showcase what you have to offer. Furthermore, your employees will get tired of straightening and maintaining the same old thing, over and over, and it will show in their interactions with the customers. Give them something to be excited about, let them tap into their creativity, and you will see a difference in their attitudes.

Try to match styles. The style of the display should parallel the style that the customer is looking for. In a boutique, this can mean a lot of different things. Are you customers looking for funky, sophisticated, or glamorous? Strive to have each display show something special about the product involved. Make it as obvious as possible that this product meets the expectations of the customer.

It is important to maintain the customer's trust when you create a display. By trust, I mean that every aspect of your customer's experience in your boutique affects the way that they think about you. Turning someone into a loyal customer is the same as turning them into a trusted friend. They have to "trust" that what you are showing them is true in order to trust you with their business and their good opinion.

You need to focus on showing the customer what they need to see to build that trust. That means being consistent with your quality and price image. If you have small signs, refined decorations, and high price tags, then you are promising the customer that you are selling unique, high quality merchandise. If you are selling bargain priced apparel in big bins with large sale prices, then your customer should expect that they are going to get some good deals, but the merchandise won't be of a high quality.

Next you need to make the customer comfortable shopping in your boutique. Nobody wants to dig through deep bins of wrinkled clothes to find what they want. They also don't want to squeeze between crowded racks, back to back with other customers, or waiting for their turn at the garment rack. You will need to create space for them to move around and leisurely shop at their own pace.

This can be more difficult in smaller boutiques. You will need to be creative with your visual displays. You want them to efficiently get your point across. You can make room for more displays by using retail display systems such as gridwall or slatwall. Slatwall panels are easily installed and can hold a lot of your inventory, creating more room on the sales floor for interesting and unique visual displays. With just a few slatwall accessories, you can create a slatwall display that is just as effective as one that takes up a lot of space.