Details, details…
Having worked in the retail industry for the majority of my life, I have learned many techniques over the years about how to display merchandise in a way that just makes you want to buy it. Obviously, it doesn’t always work, but that is the goal. Retail stores draw attention to their wares in different ways: window displays, signage, mannequins, floor stacks, vignettes, and many other visual distinctions. They are changed frequently giving the illusion that the merchandise changes as well, when in reality it just moves around, or the focus is taken off of one item and put on another. The idea is to “experience” the store every time you visit it, which may be weeks or months apart. You didn’t see that t-shirt last time you visited because you didn’t dig through the stack of hundreds of similar t-shirts on the shelf, but today it looks really great on that mannequin, right?
For those of us inside the stores, however, those displays tend to become monotonous. We walk by them dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day. We are tasked with keeping them straight and orderly. We get accustomed to the layout and navigate the store based on where things are, at least until the planogram is changed again, much like we do in our own neighborhoods and homes. We never seem to notice that dust building up on those ceiling fan blades or the weeds creeping into our gardens or that building that has been painted a different color until we step back and look at it from a different perspective, or someone points them out to us.
Our “local authority” is challenged inside our stores each and every day. Things that can take months or years to degrade or evolve outside the perception of change in the macro scale of our daily walks can happen in a matter of minutes in the micro scale of a retail environment. Most stores start their day in in fairly pristine condition and are rummaged through by shoppers until closing time. The visual aesthetic is denigrated throughout the day. Our job is to make sure that the customer that shops at 8:45 pm, 15 minutes before we close, is getting the same experience as the first customer who walks in the door at 10 am. We are often forced to step “outside” our roles as employees and attempt to look at the sales floor through a different set of eyes, through the eyes of the customer. This is often accomplished easily by simply taking a picture. A still shot of a store can be analyzed by the same set of eyes that walks through all day long and see the things that need to be fixed. Not just the obvious elements like a fallen stack of boxes or shirts that need to be folded back into a neat stack, but the minutia of a slightly crooked sign, a torn package, or a scuff on the floor or a fingerprint on the computer monitor. Things we walk by repeatedly and pay little attention to because they seem to be insignificant details.
But it is exactly that, the details, that make our experiences great, whether it is noticing the architectural details of a building that you walk by every day or the proportion of white space between product boxes on a shelf. The details define the whole and the whole frames our experience.
