How well is your retail fixture installation and fit-out strategy working for you?
Brightly colored bath bombs and soaps appear to be spilling out of open baskets and wooden crates. Minimal open shelving makes it easy for you to touch, smell, and learn about shampoos, lotions, and body care products. Chalkboard signs complete the look, giving you just enough information to draw you in.
You immediately feel relaxed and entertained by the colorful and whimsical products on display. Before you know it, your shopping basket is filled with bath bombs, dry shampoo, body lotion, and lip gloss. You can’t help it – every product is so inviting. There is something about being able to touch, feel, and smell these body care products without dealing with packaging.
LUSH Cosmetics skillfully uses sustainable fixtures and fit-outs to underscore and communicate its environmental focus and ethos. This is a brand that understands the power of retail fixtures in marketing and brand awareness.
This didn’t happen by chance. LUSH Cosmetics knows the value in partnering with a fixture installation company who expertly uses fixtures to create a retail environment that embodies the brand’s values, mission, and ethos.
Retail fixtures are visual and physical platforms that can connect with your target demographic at a single glance. There is a reason LUSH Cosmetics stores are filled with young modern consumers – it all comes down to partnering with a fixture installation company that gets it.
What do Retail Fixture Installation Companies Do?
Retail fixture installation companies are specialists in installing, maintaining, and delivering the shelving, lighting, layout, kiosks, pop-ups, and design elements that bring brand vision to life.
Look for a fixture installation company who delivers:
- Planning and Design: works with your marketing and design team, to plan your store layout, including how to arrange fixtures to highlight products, make customers feel at ease, and encourage browsing and sales.
- Fixture Installation: this is the core role of a fixture installation company, ensuring all fixtures from lighting, display cases, kiosks, shelving, graphics and signage, interactive displays, seating, and more are installed precisely, cleanly, and efficiently.
- Maintenance and Repair: preventive and reactive maintenance is a must-have when it comes to creating an inviting, professional, and profitable retail space.
- Relocations, Renovations, and Pop–Ups: manages and takes care of all dismantling, packaging, transporting, installation, and storage of your fixtures during relocations, pop-up store installations, global design roll-outs, seasonal renovations, and more.
- Project Management: managing the multiple moving parts, people, deliverables, and understanding the overall vision of your retail space to ensure you get exactly what you and your customers need.
A proven fixture installation company knows that shelves are not just shelves, that lights are about more than lighting, and that first impressions matter.
The Right Retail Fixtures for the Right Reasons
MAC Cosmetics and LUSH Cosmetics both sell body care products and cosmetics to a similar demographic – but do so with completely different retail environments.
From the window displays through to the colors, layout, fixtures, and even website design – these two brands are opposites. However, when you look closely at their products, customers, and missions, the differences are more subtle.
Walking through the mall, you know in less than a second if you’re a MAC or a LUSH person. This is the power of retail fixtures, fit-out, installation, and design.
Clearly LUSH and MAC have nailed their retail fixture installation. Can you say the same about your retail fixture installation and fit-out?
Are you using the right retail fixtures for the right reasons? Answer these questions:
- What are you selling? How do your customers like to interact with your products?
- How big is your store? Do you need to control traffic and foot patterns? Is it easy for people to see and access your products?
- What are you trying to do with your store? Do you want people to linger, browse, and spend time in your store? Can you easily host workshops, demos, or pop-up events?
- Who is actually walking into your store? Are you attracting the people you think you’re targeting?
- What are people buying? Are your fixtures helping or hindering your marketing and product promotion?
How Retail Fixtures Influence Visual Merchandising
During the pandemic, we became used to buying online. We didn’t have a choice. We would look at a website, click through images, watch some videos, scan the social feed for the brand, read reviews, click buy, and hope we were getting what we wanted. And it seemed like this type of shopping might be the way of the future…
But as soon as we could get back into stores to sit on couches and choose fabrics, take the bike for a test ride, try on clothes in a real fitting room, or feel the smart phone in our hands before buying – we did it.
The pandemic reinforced how much people like to interact with products before buying them. The pandemic reminded people why they enjoy browsing and shopping.
Your retail fixtures need to close the deal. They are what gets people in your store, browsing, lingering, asking question, buying, and returning. The strength of your visual merchandising depends on the fixtures you choose and how you use them.
These are the adjectives we use to describe how retail fixtures influence your visual merchandising:
- Powerful but understated – the power of suggestive selling and marketing without being obtrusive or overbearing
- Multi-Functional but purposeful – fits your design today but can be transformed to meet your seasonal design or store renovation
- Visible but invisible – people notice the tables, shelving, and signage but are drawn to your products
- Engaging but not the focal point – interactive displays, graphics, and window displays draw attention but do not distract from your products and brand
Think of your retail fixtures as the movie trailer or magazine cover – they need to catch attention, create curiosity, and leave people wanting more.
Top Trends in Retail Fixture Installation
Like it or not, your retail store needs to be on-trend. Regardless of your customer demographic, branding, or products – you need use the latest in retail fixtures and fit-out.
(Yes, even when retro is in – you need to update your fixtures…)
As you prepare for seasonal sales promotions and the all-important holiday season, make sure your plans include the latest retail fixture installation trends.
- Experiential
LEGO stands out with its AR brick lab, minifigure factories, and LEGO Expression installation where LEGO figures mimic customer facial expressions.
- Artificial Intelligence
Sephora Illumination, powered by ColorIQ in Toronto, Canada was an immersive installation that helped customers find their perfect shade.
- Sustainable
Nike uses repurposed electronic waste to create a brand aesthetic. Urban Outfitters is known for repurposing existing buildings through its adaptive reuse design strategy.
- Personal
Adidas made waves with its personalized videos for the 30,000 runners participating in the 2018 Boston Marathon.
- Social
Glossier leads all brands with its Instagrammable retail stores – every single detail is about Instagram and sharing online.
- Accessible
Apple is redesigning and launching stores with accessibility and comfort front-and-center, using varied table and seating heights, layouts that give wheelchair users more space, and assisted listening systems.
Your store needs to be memorable. Partner with a retail fixture installation company who has the experience, talent, knowledge, and creativity to get you noticed for the right reasons.
At Dynamic, our unique combination of IN-HOUSE offerings makes us your single source provider for all your retail fixture, fitting, and millwork installation needs. No one understands installation better than we do.
Contact us to learn how we handle any aspect of your business – from an individual installation to a global roll-out.