The Importance of Keeping up to Date With Visual Merchandising Trends

Posted On: February 15, 2022 By: blueprint_admin

Visual merchandising is the concept of catching the eye of your potential customer and persuading them to enter your premises and buy your products. This is achieved through a host of different routes, including your displays, colour schemes, layout and more. You use your retail unit to capture attention and to create a welcoming and enticing atmosphere that best shows off your products. However, visual merchandising is not a skill that you can learn and then keep with you for the rest of your retail career. It is constantly changing and shifting, updating and transforming, as customers’ needs, requirements and desires change. This means you have to keep up to date with visual merchandising trends.

Visual Merchandising Elements

Window Displays

The first time the customer comes into contact with your visual merchandising efforts is with your window display. If they like what they see in your windows, it is likely to draw them in to find out more about the offerings inside.

However, what people are looking for in shop window displays has shifted. When the high street was the only place to buy clothes, for example, you might have concentrated more on displaying a number of different ranges, showing what you have to offer. Now that people shop online, you might want to do something different with your window displays to offer something the internet cannot. You may choose to tell a story, create a display that intrigues people, or something different. You might need to think bigger in order to give people a reason to enter a physical shop.

Choose themes, add lighting, use technology to enhance what people can see. Make it so there is no choice between entering the shop and merely browsing your collections online when they get home. Give them the experience that they just cannot get from their phone.

Shopfloor Plans

Your shopfloor plans also enhance the experience of visiting your store. As we learn more about shopper psychology, we can use that to tweak our plans and make them more appealing for those inside the shop.

People don’t like bottlenecks at the best of times, but post-Covid-19 lockdowns and having spent the best part of two years socially distancing, you should avoid these at all costs when designing your layout if you want customers to feel comfortable. More open, free-flowing shopfloors will be the trend going forwards and failing to offer this might put people off visiting your store.

You can also design your shopfloor so that it guides people around the maximum amount of merchandise as they browse. One way systems could well be the preferred way of shopping going forwards, and you can use this to your advantage.

Mannequins

Shop mannequins are a key element of visual merchandising. They show off your goods as they would look on a person, and this helps the customer picture themselves wearing the clothes and using the accessories that they display.

You have to keep up with visual merchandising trends to understand how best to use mannequins to your benefit, but also to meet trends in retail in general.

One of the major trends in recent years has been to move away from gendering clothes as strictly as previously. This has a knock-on effect for visual merchandising, because retailers had to figure out how to display these gender neutral ranges. We are proud to have created the first gender neutral mannequin for sale to retailers and this is a huge step forward in how best to present clothes to all genders at the same time.

Help With Visual Merchandising

We can help you stay on top of visual merchandising thanks to our industry experience and expertise. We understand what you need to best present your business and stock to customers, as well as giving you insight into the trends in the industry. Talk to us today about retail supplies that work for you.