3 Retail Construction Mistakes to Avoid
The Importance of Clean, Organized Retail Construction Design
A lot goes into retail construction design to ensure customers feel welcomed and comfortable during their shopping experience. The last thing you want is for your potential consumers to feel claustrophobic or lost when they enter your retail store.
Great design can increase foot traffic and sales, ensure your brand is correctly positioned, and differentiate you from your competitors. But, what can you do to ensure you have the ideal retail construction design? Avoiding these common complaints is key.
1. Unclear Directions
Some shoppers enjoy the shopping experience and will meander around your store until they find just what they’re looking for. Other shoppers want to get in, find what they’re looking for, and leave to get on with their day. For the latter consumer, they’ll want to know exactly where they’re going to finish their shopping trip as soon as possible. That’s where wayfinding signage comes in.
Wayfinding signage can help your customers locate a certain product, streamlining their shopping process. These might include hanging signs above an aisle, for example, or branded identification signs near aisle entryways indicating what’s available in that aisle. When your customers know exactly where they’re going, they’re much more likely to have a positive experience and return to your store in the future.
2. Unkempt Signage
Having out-of-date or otherwise unkempt signage can turn customers away from your store. Consumers associate high-quality signage with quality products, which is why you should always have a signage preventative maintenance program in place to keep these crucial assets in the best possible condition and to replace signage as needed.
Preventive maintenance programs can help proactively address common and industry-specific maintenance issues beyond signage alone, ensuring your brand provides a reliable and meaningful experience for your customers at all times. Allowing even one outdated, damaged, or otherwise brand-inconsistent element to remain in place can be jarring for consumers and is immediately noticeable — and memorable. Mitigate this with a preventive maintenance program.
3. Bad Lighting
Lighting has a major impact on the customer experience. Brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly using lighting techniques to give shoppers the best shopping experience possible.
In a phenomenon dubbed “directional lighting,” retail locations create a detailed map of lighter and darker areas that deliberately lead customers to more desired areas. These areas might include higher-end products, sales, new product lines, and more. It’s a great way to generate impulse purchases and increase your bottom line.
Light can also shape a customer’s mood and their feelings about a store or product. Adjusting brightness, color rendering, temperature, and fixtures themselves can all have a positive impact on your sales. In fact, even the simple act of switching from fluorescent to LED lights can help you realize a measurable improvement in sales.
An Experienced Retail Construction Company Can Save You Headaches
As a decision-maker in your organization, we know you don’t have time to analyze the intricacies of retail construction design and come up with the best solution for your brand. That’s where we come in. Stratus is a brand implementation company with deep experience in the retail industry that can help you with a wide range of projects — from refreshes and remodels to signage and more. We can look at every aspect of your retail store and come up with the most cost-effective ways to boost your ROI.
When you work with us, you get a team of experts who keep you up-to-date on every aspect of your project. Our international organization utilizes a network of more than 4,000 field partners throughout the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and more. No matter where your project is, we can send an experienced team to complete it. Each of these partner businesses has been fully verified and graded by Stratus, ensuring that they have the capabilities to do the job and are ready to deliver on-time and on-budget.
Our technology solutions allow you to keep up with every stage of the project in real-time. We have a variety of apps, reporting solutions, proprietary software, dashboards, and benchmarking tools that can track permitting, bids, performance changes, asset inventory, and more.
Start Working with Stratus Today
If you’re ready to upgrade your retail construction, we’re here to help. Reach out to our team for an initial consultation today.