Take your visual merchandising to the next level
Visual merchandising can be resource-heavy; both in staff time and budget. Never fear; the days of spending hours on visual merchandising are in the past. Learn how LookDepot, along with our cutting-edge merchandising platform partner, IWD, will help you digitise and streamline your visual merchandising processes, simplify your in-store communication and compliance, and optimise your retail strategies.
Establish clear branding rules and gain control over your in-store experience
Creating physical merchandising guidelines can make your visual store planning much more complicated than it needs to be, especially if you’ve got lots of retail stores in different locations. The hours spent going back-and-forth with staff alone to decide where new products will go takes up valuable resources, which could be spent on in-store opportunities like perfecting your customer experience.
But digitising your visual retailing processes with innovative software won’t only save you time and boost your staff productivity; it’ll help you to streamline your merchandising processes, make sure your branding is consistent across stores, and help you adapt quickly to your local market needs.
The best part of planning and creating visual guidelines online? You have the option of building a more simplified, 2D store with standard linear shelving, or creating a fully-modelled virtual 3D store, allowing you to edit your product placement with incredible graphic clarity. Your brand assets are all managed in one place, so you can plan an entire range, shift a rack, move a shoe, or hang a bag on a different hook – all without leaving your seat, and in a fraction of the time it would take manually.
Save time, maximise sales, and execute your in-store branding strategy
Do you know what’s happening in all your stores, and how they look? Visual Merchandising is a crucial ingredient in your retail store success, helping you to stay on top of execution, provide the best customer experience, and improve your brand visibility and awareness. By moving your visual merchandising online, you can say goodbye to miscommunication with staff and wasted time shuffling through pages of merchandising guidelines. Using innovative merchandising software ensures that your staff implement your visual store guidelines and promotions correctly, and your stores always look and perform the way they’re meant to.
How does it work? Each visual guideline you create will automatically be associated with the POS of each individual store (or they can be manually sent). This means that each store or marketing team receives one set of instructions to implement, that can be tailored to that geographical location. Your guidelines and instructions can be accessed using the mobile app as well, so staff can be walking around the store and refer back to your guidelines to check they’re following instructions correctly.
You can also check compliance and easily share feedback with the staff implementing your guidelines. Once your store staff, Sales Area Managers, and VM’s have finished implementing your brand directives, they can submit pictures for approval, and you can communicate directly with any feedback. Store staff can also answer surveys and relay up to date store inventory and stock data, saving you and your staff hours each week and miscommunicated merchandising information.
Optimise your retail operations and enhance store performance
Now that your merchandising strategy is implemented in store, you need to know if it actually works. The IWD merchandising platform will give you a detailed visual analysis of store performance, which will show what’s working and what’s not, and help you keep track of staff and store KPIs, analyse your competitor activity, and anticipate your customers’ next moves. It’s also a useful tool when planning your next merchandising cycle; using sales data to make sure you’re delivering the right offers in the right place.
Plus, the IWD visual merchandising platform is a great retail negotiation tool with retailers; giving you product level, category level, shelf level or store zone data, and heat map options
To identify hot spots and cold zones. When it comes to your visual merchandising, there’s not much this sanity-saving platform doesn’t do.
The benefits of digitising your retail merchandising
Reduce costs by up to 40%
Save 25% of your daily time
Improve productivity by 35%
Save costs by planning stores visually and sending out online guidelines, so your valuable staff can spend less time printing and shipping guidelines to stores, and more time perfecting your in-store customer experience.
Have a lot of stores to keep in the loop? Get rid of inefficient processes and make sure your retail staff all have the same information to implement guidelines and promotions correctly, and maintain brand consistency.
Improve team collaboration and gain complete control over your customer experience. Customised guidelines and real-time communication mean less time dealing with compliance, and more time delivering the best experience.
Engaging brand content and well thought out visual aesthetics are more important than ever – both in-store and online. With LookDepot, you can streamline your visual merchandising and content creation using our innovative StyleShoots product and fashion photography technology, to help you create incredible content that will lift customer engagement, drive traffic to your business, and boost your sales.
We work with brands of all sizes throughout New Zealand and now Australia; spanning fashion, homewares, FMCG, health and beauty, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, and more. Whether you have one product or thousands, we can help you build brand visibility and awareness with our simple but cutting edge content creation technology, and run your retail stores seamlessly with our time-saving Visual Merchandising Software partner, IWD.
Contact us to learn more or book a free demo.