Catch-up with our 2024 blog posts with this guide to the who, what, why, how, and when of retail design and installation
The Internet has changed everything about how we live, work, and play. This is a fact.
But one thing remains the same – people want to visit your retail store. We like leaving our houses and shopping.
We enjoy browsing in stores. We like to touch and feel products before we buy them. Because shopping in real life gives us something the Internet can’t.
And if there is one thing we’ve learned in our 30-year history it’s that retail stores are here to stay.
In this blog, we have collected our top 2024 retail design and installation insights – use this post as your guide to what customers want from retail and how you can give it to them.
We want your retail store to be a success. We want you to have the store that people are posting about on social media and lining up to get into.
This is why we’re here, sharing our knowledge with you about retail design and installation. We want you to know what we know.
What Customers Want From Retail
Retail today is about people. Supporting and helping people. Answering questions. That extra touch that shows you care about them.
Your products matter, but it’s your customer service that seals the deal. Customer service and experience is what builds brand and customer loyalty. This is what gets people returning to your store.
Your customers place a priority on good customer service and if they don’t get it, they shop elsewhere:
- 96% of surveyed customers say they leave brands due to poor customer service
- 62% of surveyed customers are happy to pay for good customer service
- 55% of surveyed consumers look forward to shopping in stores
- 40% of surveyed consumers don’t like buying without first touching and seeing the product
- 72% of surveyed consumers showroom products
- 45% of consumers shop primarily in brick-and-mortar stores rather than online
(Statistic sources: 53 Data-Backed Retail Statistics Shaping Retail in 2022 and Beyond, Top 11 Retail Trends (2024 & 2025), Brick-and-Mortar Retail Statistics)
Key statistics about retail stores and sales:
- $7.18 trillion in predicted brick-and-mortar retail sales in 2026
- 72% of consumers shop in stores every week
- 1.067 million stores in the U.S.
- 41% of surveyed shoppers report an experience with unhelpful retail store employees
(Statistics source: Brick-and-Mortar Retail Statistics and 2023 Retail Customer Experience Survey)
Question For You: How well does your retail design and visual merchandising support your customers and give them what they want?
How to Use Millwork Design to Create Stores that Sell
The human touch. An environment that feels just right. Customers and retail employees who have the same interests as you. Community. A sense of belonging.
This is the power of retail millwork design.
Millwork represents your ethos, brand, and mission. This is what draws people to your store and your brand. People want to be what your aesthetic and store vibe represent.
Retail millwork done right helps people see themselves in your brand’s personality.
The millwork in your retail store, must nail these 5 key deliverables:
- Brand Identity: a picture is worth a thousand words, and your picture is defined by the millwork you choose. The texture, finish, materials, and overall style tell your customers who you are and what you mean to them. Think of luxury brands using dark mahogany shelving, plush leather seating, and the latest in technology.
- Aesthetic Appeal: compare the stark shelving used in Costco to how shelving, display cases, racks, and more are used in the Petco’s New York City flagship store. As soon as people walk in, they expect a specific experience and level of service.
- Functional Design: your millwork needs to work for your products. Great millwork can help sell less-than-great products but sub-par millwork will let down even the best products.
- Visual Merchandising: from the decompression zone, through the store and to the cash, your millwork should guide customers to your featured products, making it easy for them to browse and buy.
- Personalization: from global brands to single retail stores, brand personality is a must-have. When choosing and installing your millwork remember your customers choose to shop in brick-and-mortar because they want to do more than buy a thing – they want community, identity, support, communication, and everything in between.
Do not be the store that people use to showroom products. Be the destination retail store, the one people make time to visit on the weekend or add to their must-visit list when traveling.
Question For You: What story does your retail millwork tell customers?
What Does a Store Display Installer Do?
A store display installer is responsible for setting up and arranging product displays in retail stores or other commercial spaces. Their main role is creating visually appealing and effective displays to attract customers and highlight products or promotions.
Store display installers work closely with visual merchandisers and store management to ensure displays align with your branding and marketing strategies.
Often called retail fixture installers, these professionals have an important role in bringing your retail brand to life.
Store display installer responsibilities can include:
- Retail Fixture Assembly and Installation: assemble all fixtures including custom millwork, shelving, display units, racks, signage, lighting, and digital displays.
- Product Placement: arrange merchandise based on the guidance and plans provided by your visual merchandising team.
- Store Maintenance: update and maintain displays to ensure retail store quality and image. Install and roll-out seasonal and promotional displays, fixtures, signage, and lighting as needed.
Question For You: Who are you trusting with your retail installation?
What are the 5 Keys to Retail Installation?
Whether you’re launching a new brick-and-mortar store or planning a redesign of your global brand, you need to nail these 5 keys to retail installation:
- Retail Store Layout
Your customers rely on you for direction and guidance. You need to make it easy for them to find and buy products. Your store layout is critical to making this happen.
Standard layout options include: grid or straight, loop or racetrack, free-flow, and fixed path. - Decompression Zone and Space
The decompression zone is essential for welcoming people to your store and easing them into browsing and shopping. Remember that most people will turn right when they enter a store, so use retail fixtures and millwork to highlight your products and guide them through the store. - Checkout Displays
Your checkout display is likely the final interaction people have with your store and brand, so make it memorable and helpful. Consider the size and design of your checkout, the additional products you display near it, and how easy it is for customers to interact with your sales team. - Convenient and Engaging Product Placement
Think strategically about how you use retail fixture options such as shelving, display cases or boards, gondolas, interactive touch screens and mirrors, focal wall units, nesting tables to show, tell, guide, sell, connect, and engage customers. - Think Like Your Customers
You need to make your customers happy. You need to make it easy for them to solve their challenges and fulfill their wants and needs.
A successful retail installation puts the customer front-and-center. Ask how you can give your customers the best possible store experience. Do they need places to sit down and relax? Do they want to be entertained or are they just coming in to shop and leave?
On the surface, your retail fit out is about your brand and products – but deep down, it’s all about your customers. Give them what they want. Satisfy their needs. Make them feel supported, seen, and heard.
Question For You: How well does your retail installation and design support your customers?
7 Questions to Ask About Your Pop-Up Store Design
Brick-and-mortar shoppers have seen it all: music concerts, skateboard ramps, virtual fitting rooms, personalized shoppers, product customization stations, and more.
Your challenge is to do more and be different with your pop-up retail design.
Use these 7 questions to help you focus your pop-up store design:
- What are the goals of the pop-up shop? Understand why you’re creating the pop-up and who the target audience is.
- What are our design objectives? Think about what you want people to take away from your pop-up installation.
- How can we use experiential design elements? You do not need to use experiential design elements. The key here is in ensuring you’re using experiential design because it adds value to the customer experience.
- Do we want to take risks? Is there a design feature you’re curious about, test it with your pop-up before incorporating it into your brick-and-mortar store.
- Does technology make sense? Digital displays and augmented and virtual reality installations are all the rage – but this doesn’t mean they’re right for your brand and pop-up design. Know why you’re using this technology. Know that it makes sense for your customers.
- Are there brand collaboration opportunities for us? Think about how you can access and market to new customers. Is there a way to create complementary shop-in-shop installations that benefit both brands?
- How will we market our pop-up? Your marketing plan needs to correlate with your pop-up design, customers, location, and purpose.
Questions For You: Why are you rolling out a pop-up shop? Who are you designing it for? Who do you want to visit your pop-up? Why should they visit your pop-up instead of your brick-and-mortar or website?
What is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Retail Installation?
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in retail installation refers to using design, installation, and store lay-out practices to create inclusive and welcoming retail spaces for all people, regardless of their unique needs or characteristics.
- Diversity in Retail Installation: from your marketing materials through to your window displays, mannequins, product displays, and complete retail design and installation, diversity matters. Use inclusive and diverse imagery, messaging, and language that is free from stereotypes and assumptions and represents all identities.
For example, your window display is the first thing customers see. Make sure your display uses diverse imagery representing different ages, genders, body types, abilities, and ethnicities. This is your opportunity to clearly communicate a message of belonging. - Equity in Retail Installation: ensure your store provides equal access to your products, services, and retail space for everyone, including people with visible and hidden disabilities.
Consider the store lay-out, width of aisles, retail fixture heights, and accessible seating and change rooms. Use graphics, signage, and interactive technology to support people with hearing loss, visual impairment, or neurological differences.
- Inclusion in Retail Installation: means every person feels welcomed and supported by your retail store. It’s important to create a retail environment where people with differences can browse and shop seamlessly without drawing unnecessary attention or feeling singled out.
Gender neutral and diverse graphics, signage and mannequins, designated quiet hours with dimmed lights and reduced music, round tables, wide aisles and doorways, and interactive displays to help people communicate with store staff are just some examples of inclusive retail interior installation options. - Accessibility in Retail Installation: is about more than wide doorways, ramps, tactile signage, and easily reachable shelves and checkout areas.
Accessible retail design and installation goes beyond the physical, recognizing that people have non-obvious differences and needs including neurodiversity and sensory.
Ensure all of your retail touchpoints including your customer service team, branding and marketing, products and services, and retail installation clearly welcome and support all individuals.
Question For You: How welcoming, inclusive, and accessible is your retail store?
How Does Store Renovation Enhance Customer Loyalty and Engagement
On the surface, your store renovation is about new lighting, signage, and layout, but in reality, it has deep impacts on customer loyalty and engagement:
- Improved Customer Perception: a fresh and new retail interior signals to loyal and curious customers that the brand is invested in keeping people happy and fulfilling their needs.
- Modern Visual Merchandising: new lighting, colors, signage, window displays, fixtures and millwork, and technology upgrades create a more welcoming, engaging, and relaxing in-store experience.
- High-Touch Personalized Experiences: bridging the gap from online to real-life shopping, personalized shopping experiences go a long way in helping customers feel seen and heard.
- Improved Store Layout: because customers expect more than shelves displaying products, your store layout needs to evolve. Updating your store layout to better support and optimize the new customer journey can result in improved sales, longer store browsing times, and a sense of community.
- Updated Store Design: today’s shoppers are much more in-touch with personal identity, wanting a sense of belonging, and seeing themselves represented by retail brands and their stores.
Remember, store design includes everything in your store – lighting, fixtures, seating, customer service and support, signage, checkout, music, color, and more.
Your retail store exists for your customers – so give them a real-life shopping environment they look forward to.
Questions For You: Is it time for a store renovation and remodel? What do you dislike/like about your retail store design?
How Well Do You Know Dynamic?
Dynamic got its start when Evan saw room for improvement in how his retail store displays and fixtures were installed, managed, and maintained.
And here we are 30 years later, working with Fortune 1000 brands and their suppliers to design, build, and maintain their physical retail spaces.
We offer a wide range of services, from architectural field site surveys to the installation of store fixtures, graphics, branding, and visual merchandising, to the full construction of retail spaces.
- 6 offices in New York City, Portland OR, Atlanta GA, London, Dublin, and Tokyo
- 8,000 projects completed annually around the world for retailers, wholesale brands, fixture manufacturers, and graphic suppliers
- 140 global employees
- 1,750 global contractors
- 500,000 square feet of warehouse space managed and maintained by the Dynamic team
- 25,000 square foot Retail Training Academy in Dublin
- Global presence with projects completed throughout the USA, Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Brazil
- Clients include Nike, Chanel, Levi Strauss, Michael Kors, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, Apple, Tag Heuer, and Estée Lauder
- 60th on Inc. Magazine’s “500 Fastest Growing Companies”, 2001
We specialize in implementing all on-site initiatives, from store audits and site surveys, to fixture, graphic, and branding installations, as well as preventative and reactive maintenance.
“Evan – we love Dynamic. From the very early days, you found the ‘best of the best’ to work with. Macy’s Day Parade, Skechers, LEGO flagship, and Savage all come to mind but there have been so many successful outcomes during some challenging projects.
When we choose Dynamic, we know we are going to have leadership, ownership and experience.
Here’s to much continued success in the future,” says Stephen Hekman, Executive Vice President, Kingsmen Projects US.
Over the past 30 years, our business has followed the needs of our customers. Starting with basic assembly and installation, to window displays, graphics, branding, digital and outdoor signage – everything we do is driven by client requests and our desire to always service the customer.
Question For You: What challenges do you have with your retail store design, installation, and maintenance?
Contact us to learn how we handle any aspect of your business – from an individual retail store to a global brand roll-out. We are here for you.