Window Dressing 101: Redesign Your Store's Display Window to Lure the Shoppers Inside

The mystique of "window shopping" is alive and well inside your suburban shopping mall and in the better shopping districts of your city. Strolling down the avenue, you're looking for something that will interest you. Let's say you're a railroad enthusiast. You make sure to pass the hobby store, and look in the window to see if they're featuring any new HO gauge steam locomotives. Sure enough, they are. You wander inside to examine it close up.

The storeowner smiles. He knows that the chances of him making a sale have just gone way up since you moved from his front window to inside the door.

Your prime goal in your display window -- your front page -- is to get the shopper inside. If she doesn't click on SOMETHING, anything, she'll be gone in seconds. That makes every square inch of space in your store window tremendously valuable. Everything must go except elements that contribute to your prime goal of pulling that shopper inside your store -- that is, getting her to click on something else. How do you do this?

My daughter and I spent a pleasant morning this week studying the strategies used by shopowners in the Sunrise Mall to attract customers in the door. It is known as the art of "visual merchandising." We found six key guidelines to an effective window dressing:

1. Constantly Change the Window Display
2. Provide Strong Brand Differentiation
3. Remove Barriers from the Entrance
4. Trumpet What's On Sale
5. Lead with Popular Products
6. Show as Many Products as Possible

We'll also examine how seven online retailers implement these principles on their front pages. Come back to study their techniques.

• Yahoo! Shopping http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6shopyahoo.gif
• Amazon.com Tools http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6amazontools.gif
• BN.com http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6bn.gif
• Land's End http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6landsend.gif
• Micro Warehouse http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6microwarehouse.gif
• CDNow http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6cdnow.gif
• Wal-Mart http://wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/6walmart.gif

1. Constantly Change the Window Display

The first rule of window dressing is change. How often does a window shopper come to the mall? A teenage girl and her friends may come to the mall every week or two, to try on clothes and check out the guys. You're not aiming at the "average" shopper here, you aiming at the average "frequent" shopper who is your best customer. If you can offer her a new front window each time she comes, then you've succeeded in maintaining her interest.

Why? Because if everything looks the same, there's no incentive to return until you need something. Unlike B2B procurement, retail shoppers are often looking for something that strikes their fancy, that is, an "impulse buy." If they find something that clicks with them, they'll buy. If they don't see it, you have no sale.

The larger online storeowner will want to have a graphic designer working with a merchandiser to constantly have something new. The smaller online shopowner can get by with changing the products displayed on the front page every week or so, with a seasonal redesign every two or three months. I suggest you print out a grid with dates on the left, and checklist items across the top. This will help you remember to do the routine tasks that will consistently produce a fresh and interesting Window Display.

2. Provide Strong Brand Differentiation

The second strategy I saw again and again in the Sunrise Mall was strong brand differentiation. By this I mean that each store has a unique and clear sign with the name in a distinctive type, and possibly a logo. Moreover, the design is carried out through the entire store. An "industrial" type sign on a young women's shop signals an "industrial" look throughout. Mrs. See's Candy has a strong black and white motif that involves everything from floor tiles to counters to the exterior.

Why is this branding differentiation so important in a mall? Mr. Samer Tashta, Jordanian store manager of Tops Men's Fashions, explains, "We're so close to Macy's," he nods toward the entrance of the anchor tenant a few hundred feet away. "We're so close we HAVE to be different." For Tops Men's Fashions it means displaying suits you can't find in Macy's. This week it was a tan Zoot Suit with suspenders and a dark brown shirt. Very striking, very different. It stopped us in our tracks, and made us wonder what else was in the store. No, there's no chance of finding me in a Zoot Suit, but it was intriguing and markedly different -- just what you're looking for in a window display.

It's the same way on the Net. You can't afford to look like every other store. You have to be different. Your store design must be both attractive and striking so that you stick in the shopper's mind. Your branding, your design must make an impression on the first visit or you'll blend into that amorphous mist of "Internet stores" instead of forging a memorable identity.

Here are some of my memories of the Sunrise Mall:

• The smell of leather -- Wilson's Leather
• Red satin, red and pink everything -- Victoria Secret
• Shoes arranged according to size -- Payless ShoeSource
• Five TV monitors showing the same picture of dance and energy and color -- Express

If you want shoppers to step into your store, you must be different -- clearly different. Your design and brand must be compelling, must attract interest, must intrigue your shoppers. The "different" shops are the ones my daughter and I would slip into. At the "ho-hum" stores we didn't bother.

I'm impatient when it comes to the use of MacroMedia Flash to produce colorful action on a splash page. I want to get on to the store's interior. I'm always asking "Where's the beef?" But then again, I'm not a Gen-Xer. Short bursts of action and color typify Gen-X TV ads, and Flash may typify Gen-X websites, where the "experience" is an important part of the brand. I recommend doing extensive testing to learn the preferences of your target audience rather than the proclivities of your graphic design team or your old-fogy CEO. ;-)

3. Remove Barriers from the Entrance

The stores in the Sunrise Mall are of two types:

• Expanses of plate glass window and elaborate doorways (part of the distinct brand look and feel), and
• Roll-up doors that open the entire front of the store to the shoppers walking past.

While the elaborate doorways were grand and attractive, we were much more inclined to step into stores that had removed all the barriers. In these doorless stores there were no display windows per se. Rather colorful stacks of products would be placed on tables near the entrance. Sometimes tables would extend slightly onto the sidewalk to make coming into the store so gradual that it wouldn't necessarily require a conscious decision.

The best stores had deliberate devices to attract your eye and pull it to the back wall so you would be forced to see the entire expanse of the store, and increase your chances of entering. Exotic lighting, a bold sign, an undulating neon tube, items hung from the ceiling were some of the methods used to pull the eye and the interest deep into the store.

How do you "webify" the principle of removing barriers? I see splash pages as barriers, since they keep the visitor from "seeing" the store immediately. They also require an extra click. The more clicks required to get to what your visitors come to see, the fewer visitors will get there -- and studies show that the rate of arrivals drops rapidly with each click. Front pages that essentially provide navigation only to Products | About Us | FAQ | Contact Us | Order are also barriers. Your visitor can't "see" into the store. (Navigation was discussed in an earlier article in this series.)

Take a look at each of the example stores we selected for the week prior to Father's Day 2000. Each of them showed at least a few products on the front page. The "department store" sites, such as Yahoo! Shopping, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, have the most trouble, since by definition you'll need to drill down their hierarchical menu a few clicks to get where you're going. But all of these stores put some products out front for you to examine. They also show a listing of the aisles in the store so you can immediately see the "lay of the land."

In the Sunrise Mall, I observed a serious mistake. Mrs. Fields' Cookies had a bay window as part of the brand "look", but it created a barrier across half the narrow opening, making it feel closed in. The branding element got in the way of inviting the customer inside quickly. Make sure that neither your branding nor your navigation keep your customer from seeing something interesting in your window. 

4. Trumpet What's On Sale

One of the constants we saw in the Sunrise Mall was "Sale" signs displayed prominently. One mall store had red sale tags hanging from the ceiling. They didn't want you to miss the message. Strangely, on our selection of Internet retailers, only CDNow prominently displayed a sale. Why is that?

We observed that none of the mall's anchor stores -- Sears, JCPenney, and Macy's -- had much of a window display at all. They are relying on their advertising and powerful brand to bring the shoppers inside. But the other mall shops live off the traffic generated by the anchor stores, and the synergy created by having so many places to shop in one venue. Store after store in the mall had a huge sale sign in the window, or intruding a bit onto the sidewalk so it wouldn't be missed.

Perhaps Internet retailers are missing an opportunity to bring people inside the store by not offering sales more prominently. In a brick-and-mortar setting sales are used to bring the customers in, and then careful merchandising induces them to open their wallets wider. A sale isn't just useful because of its advertising and promotional value, but also because of its ability to bring shoppers beyond the front page on an impulse. I recommend using sales to get them inside your store, and then, with every item on sale, offer two or three cross-sell or up-sell offers on the same page.

5. Lead with Popular Products

Nearly every store in the Sunrise Mall had gifts for Father's Day or Graduation. A survey of our online retailers shows a similar pattern. The women's clothing stores displayed sandals and swimwear up front. It's not that everyone looking in your window is looking for a Father's Day gift, but a significant percentage of them may be. The message is: Lead with seasonal and popular items.

We found tables of seasonal and/or sale merchandise located near the entrance to the store. Usually the display placed a strong emphasis on color. Products tended to be massed together in groups, even in window displays, to make a strong impression.

Also show hot new items on your Front Page. The WaldenBooks mall store had a display of Harry Potter books. Of our online retailers, both Yahoo! Shopping and BN.com had Harry Potter Countdown sections to take advantage of the strong interest in the appearance of the fourth book in this popular children's series about a wizard-in-training.

Make sure your high profit items are visible in your Front Window. You may just break even on sale items, but your high margin products can help even that out.

6. Show as Many Products as Possible

The final lesson of Sunrise Mall was to show as many products as possible. I asked Mr. Tashta of Tops Men's Fashions how he selected items to appear in the window. "We try to keep a representation in the window of the kinds of products we carry," he told me. That makes sense. If the customer sees something he's interested in, he has no problem going in the door to explore it further.

But there's a limit to what you can put in a display window without making it appear cluttered. The more items you show, the less dramatic is your display of single products. But mall stores with fronts open to the sidewalk have a distinct advantage. They can use the full height of their walls, as well as the back wall of the store to show their wares, and use tricks of light, motion, color, and line to move your eye to see their products.

One of the chief disadvantages of an online Front Window is the limited space you have to work with. All our online retailers have a clear logo in a small area at the top left of the screen. It isn't overly large because the branding would compete for space with the products that are the point of a retail store. The online retailers typically used the top right of the screen for navigation, the left side for a fairly shallow menu of 15 to 20 product categories that correspond to the aisles and fixtures you see in the mall shops. The center and right of the Front Window is usually devoted to particular products.

Yahoo! Shopping shows a sock puppet, and uses most of its space to promote types of products (Father's Day gifts) and featured store logos. But most of the rest show two or three featured products only. Lands' End shows a single large picture of only one product on their front page -- swim trunks for Dad. MicroWarehouse shows eight products -- the most of any of our retailers -- with button links on the left to 15 product categories.

On your Front Page you must entice your shopper by showing some products, as well as give an idea of the rest of the products you carry.

There's no easy way to retail online, but if you can move your shoppers from looking at your Display Window to the inside of your store, you have a good chance of securing a sale. Happy window dressing!