Managing Small Retail Spaces

Retail spaces can get cramped for a number of reasons. You may have decided to expand and offer more products. Maybe you are offering an entire new department. You could just be running out of storage space. Or, you might have chosen a small space to have an affordable retail space in a good location. Whatever your reasons, you need a way to deal with the small space without sacrificing sales or image.

Not having much room means that you need to get creative. Creative displays are what make boutiques so popular today. Displays need to be effective and satisfy needs for the customers. For example, when a customer enters a store and approaches a display, they have many questions going through their heads. They are wondering if they like the product. They then consider what other people will think. They imagine how the garments would make them feel. Then they check out quality, price, and the availability of their size.

Setting up your displays with these customer questions in mind will help you to overcome some of the hurdles that retailers face. You can’t necessarily only put out a few sizes of each item, or customers will assume that you probably don’t have their size and they won’t go through the process. You don’t want everything to look like clearance. If there are fully stocked displays, then customers feel like they are getting something new and popular. If the inventory is low, they might assume that you are not restocking this item for some reason. It could be quality, popularity, or some other unknown that turns them off when they look at the display.

So, this leaves you with a predicament. You need to save space. You want to offer more and more products. But, you don’t want to put out skimpy amounts of each thing. Even more important, you don’t want your store to get crowded and look like a bargain bin. The solution is to utilize retail displays designed to conquer this particular problem.

The most popular and cost effective solution is to use slatwall panels. You can install slatwall in a store and take full advantage of vertical space. You can hang and display hundreds of items on the walls of your store or boutique, even in a small amount of square footage. This can leave the floor open to creating more attractive and elaborate displays.

Using slatwall not only saves space, but it makes your store easy to shop in. All of your items can face outward toward the customer. Customers can shop without touching anything. They can see what each item looks like and also see that your inventory is stocked. If something’s running low, you can simply switch out the bar for a shorter one to make your store look continuously stocked.

Using slatwall and slatwall panels in your store will make you and your customers happier.

About the Author: Ron Maier is the Vice President of S & L Store Fixtures, a leading online resource for retail displays, including mannequins, dress mannequin forms, female mannequins, slatwall and slatwall panels. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.