How to Train Staff to Maintain Retail Displays

Posted On: July 11, 2024 By: SEOAdmin

Maintaining visually appealing and effective retail displays is crucial for attracting customers to your shop and encouraging them to come back again in the future. It’s all well and good setting up these displays, but you also need to keep them looking presentable.

For the sake of consistency and to attract shoppers from the street, you need to train staff to maintain retail displays. This article provides a guide to helping your employees understand how important displays can be and the steps you should take to provide them with the knowledge they need to keep them looking good.

Understanding the Importance of Retail Displays

Retail displays are more than just a random arrangement of products; they are a critical aspect of visual merchandising that influences customer behaviour and sales. It’s essential that you communicate this to your staff.

Well-maintained displays:

• Attract Customers: Eye-catching displays draw customers into the shop and encourage them to explore more.
• Enhance Shopping Experience: Organised and visually appealing displays make shopping more enjoyable and memorable.
• Increase Sales: Strategic product placement and appealing displays can boost impulse buys and overall sales.
• Reflect Brand Image: Consistent and attractive displays reinforce your store’s brand identity and professionalism.

By understanding these benefits, staff will appreciate the value of maintaining high standards for retail displays.

Establishing Clear Guidelines

To make sure your displays are maintained in the right way, you should set out some guidelines and make them accessible to staff. This means that there is no doubt about what is expected.

The guidelines should cover:

• Visual Standards: Things such as colour schemes, themes, and seasonal changes.
• Product Placement: Instructions on how and where products should be placed, including height, spacing, and grouping.
• Maintenance Routine: Outline regular maintenance tasks such as dusting, rearranging, and restocking displays.
• Signage and Pricing: Include standards for signage, pricing labels, and promotional materials to ensure they are always accurate and visually appealing.

Having a detailed manual or digital document that staff can refer to ensures that everyone is on the same page and keeps your displays looking good.

Conducting Initial Training

Start training staff to maintain retail displays with an introduction to what you want to achieve. This should include an orientation session on the importance of visual merchandising and how it impacts the store’s success. You can use visual demonstrations to show staff how to set up and maintain displays. Use actual products and spaces in the shop to illustrate how it will work in practice.

Provide comprehensive training materials, including videos, manuals and checklists that staff can review as needed. Give them practical tasks to complete based on their learning and provide constructive feedback.

Ongoing Training and Refreshers

Continuous training and regular refreshers are essential to keep your employees’ skills sharp. You should hold monthly or quarterly regular meetings to review your display standards, introduce new techniques and discuss upcoming changes or promotions. Create opportunities for staff to give and receive feedback on the procedures so you can make it an easier process to complete.

Ongoing training ensures that staff remain engaged and knowledgeable about maintaining high-quality displays.

Assigning Responsibility

To help make maintaining retail displays an intuitive part of the working day, assign roles to different staff members. These include:

• Display Leads: Assign display leads who are responsible for overseeing the setup and maintenance of displays in specific sections of the shop.
• Team Assignments: Divide the staff into teams, each responsible for different areas or types of displays. They can take ownership of these areas, providing accountability for keeping them up to standard.
• Performance Reviews: Include display maintenance as a part of regular performance reviews to emphasise its importance and be sure to reward excellent work.
• Checklists and Schedules: Provide daily or weekly checklists and schedules to ensure all display maintenance tasks are completed regularly.

Encouraging Creativity and Initiative

It is important to have guidelines in place, but by also encouraging creativity and initiative among staff you make it more fun and maybe work out ways to improve the maintenance.

Create incentive programmes that reward staff for innovative and effective display ideas. You can also ask employees to submit their display ideas and provide a platform for showcasing the most successful concepts.

Promote teamwork by having staff collaborate on major display projects and allow some flexibility within the guidelines to enable them to experiment and personalise displays while maintaining the overall standards.

Need Retail Display Items

To help you set up your retail display, browse our shop to find everything from mannequins to garment rails. With shiny new items in your shop, your employees will be keen to keep them looking great and help you maintain them so that they attract and keep even more customers. Talk to us today on 0800 0223237 for help choosing the items that will make your shop stand out.