The advent of websites like Amazon, eBay, and the like, got some to lose faith in conventional shopping and they might seem to have a point! Total gross revenue of Amazon as the second one-trillion-dollar company ever, weeks after Apple reached the whopping milestone, exceeds any other retail brand. There’s another side you might be neglecting though! How is any neighborhood in a city or the whole city itself glued together? It’s always been the local or central shop interior design that people gathered and connected with their fellow-citizens.
It has not been just about what they would buy. It was way more than that! Some call it a journey of the customer that includes a thorough experience of walking, seeing, hearing, listening, smelling, sometimes laughing, getting tired and grabbing refreshments along the way, trying out stuff, and finally maybe purchasing what he or she hoped to find.
Online shopping falls short of such experience and that’s exactly why it will never quite knock traditional shopping out of the picture. The ever-thriving shop interior design field all along the years online shopping startups rose, is an indication of our claim.
Here we want to shed a light on how shop interior design ideas could significantly up sales and lure potential customers into visiting your store and hopefully make a purchase and continue to do so.
Let’s have a go at features that help create an effective shop interior design. We will start with some basic principles and branch out into the journey a customer goes through from the moment they lay eyes on the storefront to when they check out.
1. All Senses Geared Up
To create a lasting memory of your store in the customers’ mind, you have to take it up from just the visuals. You have to engage all their senses, cause the more engaged they are, the more you can be sure you’ve instilled your shop interior design’s experience.
Visual appeal that’s usually first that comes to mind, addresses the cleanness, right proportions in facades, and proper architectural lighting and use of the material in your shop.
But aside from what meets the eye, you have to worry about what your customer hears at the background; what he or she smells as they walk around at the store, and what the things he touches make him feel.
Smells are strongly connected to memory and so they can help create a positive picture. Your customers will unconsciously bind your brand with the smell they breathe at your store; so it has to match your brand’s character and concept.
For instance, the smell of Danish tulips doesn’t relate to where they sell computer electronics. So, watch out for what you put together.
The same goes for what your customers hear. Although it has more of an at-the-moment effect. For example, upbeat music might cause a more impulsive behavior by the customer that tips the scales in your favor.
That’s always the case with department stores where people wheel around their shopping carts and may willingly pluck stuff out of shelves without giving it a second thought.
Cleanness is the most important factor in terms of what the customer touches when he or she enters your store; just as it is in a visual sense in boutique interior design.
2. Divide and Conquer
To be able to handle your customers’ senses every step of the way, and not to overwhelm them with a single undefined shop interior design, you have to break your store into different parts. This way, you can think through each section carefully and only concentrate on what each one needs.
Think of your store’s concept as a book with a handful of chapters. You would want your customers to read through each chapter and appreciate your whole story.
The main sections are the outer area of your shop interior design that includes the street, its sidewalk and green landscape, your storefront, entrance area, the main body of the store and its circulation, and finally the check-out point.
All of which we discover in the next 7 sections. So, let’s move forward, one by one!
3. The Outer Shell Always makes the First Impression
You will probably hear the term “telling a story” in all the sections to come, as you’ve heard it before! You have to give away your punchline upfront with how your store looks from the outside. Then your shop interior design will elaborate the story as your customers decide to come in.
Depending on how big it is, an entering band of up to fifteen feet of your shop is a transition area where your customers take their first impression of how your shop interior design is; what it wants to say and how much they’re probably gonna pay.
Apart from exhibiting a strong message, you should know that due to its transitional nature, most items in the threshold area, don’t get paid much direct attention; something to keep in mind when designing this area.
4. Look to Your Right
Shop interior design study shows that for some reason, a majority of customers swerve right after they enter a shop interior design. To mount on this general tendency, the boldest, most eye-catching items should be put on the right side upon the customers’ entry.
This will make a counter-clock-wise circulation across the store ground which matches people’s instinct just after they get into your shop interior design.
Check out some of the designs that have seen this rule of thumb through on Pinterest.
5. Map Out a Winding Path
The main plot of the story we referred to earlier has to be told here. To best utilize the space of a shop interior design, you have to make sure you give an overall view of the whole place, just to clear out any ambiguity.
You may not have aisles in the traditional sense, but you have to have some sort of a reasonable grouping of your products for your customers to know their way around your shop.
The paths you design has to smooth navigation while guide customers around the store. Well-designed aisle end-points that entice customers to walk all the way to the end, maximize the time they spend around your products and their exposure to them.
6. Bump Their Speed
The last thing you want is for your customers to indifferently pass by what you’ve put up all over the path we talked about. They sure already are in rush; That’s what has made all the favor toward online shopping methods!
You have to make the so-called “speed bumps” that may change weekly or monthly to hold on to the element of surprise and pause they prompt. They may be displays of high-demand products or new ones that are always long-coveted, all across your shop interior design.
7. Give Them Comfort
You have to make your customers feel comfortable. It should be a top priority in the process of shop interior design. That seems obvious but there are two quite different sides if you look closely.
There’s this phenomenon introduced by Paco Underhill, as “Butt-Brush Effect” that claims nobody, especially women don’t like to wither be brush or brush someone else’s back; or front for that matter!
Narrow passages or any other similar places where there’s a chance of butt-brush effect incidence. You have to make sure you tiptoe around this phenomenon.
The other side is about slacking off and letting your feet relax. Seating opened up areas where people could rest for a minute and therefore spend more time in your shop interior design.
This might be especially helpful with the ones who tag along without any intention to make a purchase. Check out the shop interior design ideas for seating sections on Pinterest.
8. Let Them Breathe
Stores that are packed with racks of items might fluster customers and complicate their navigation. You need to let your guests take a moment once in a while and freshen up.
No matter how interesting each one of a long line of products is, their sometimes-infinite bunch will bore everyone out. So, make sure you wedge open breathing spaces in the middle of your overflowing shop interior design!
9. Check Out Counter
What makes a good exit check-out point is having it where it naturally beckons shoppers to stop. If you go along with the right-side rule, after having your customers circle around your shop interior design, you’ll end up with the front left for the check-out point.
Here are some shop interior design ideas to keep in mind when designing your check out area; Things like using the wall where your cashier leans back to, for interesting captivating visual messages, or arranging items that invite offhand pick-up by customers.
Conclusion
Shop interior design should be more than just about buying stuff. So, with all the influx toward online retail, maintaining the essential role of the experience of shopping close up to what you want to buy is shop interior design architects’ burden to haul.
Given the journey-like nature of what the customer goes through, you need to take care of each link of the chain that tells the story of your shop and more importantly, brand. How your potential customer, falls at your doorstep, enters, takes turns, spends time, rests along the way, and makes a purchase and hopefully continues to do so, all depend on how you design each part up to the behavior it is supposed to embrace.
Which store’s shop interior design ideas has really caught you off guard by its glamorous looks and persistent intrigue all the way through? Tell us the story in the comments section below.
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