Add breaks or speed bumps

Having the same fixtures or aisles in your store could result in shoppers skipping over your merchandise.

Brian Dyches, chief experience officer at Ikonic Tonic told Entrepreneur that upon studying shopping patterns, they found that “up to 20 percent of the store’s merchandise is skipped over” because of long uninterrupted aisles. To address this, Dyches recommends that retailers create visual breaks in the middle of long aisles. These breaks can come in the form of signs or displays.

We can see a lot of supermarkets putting this tactic into action. Since these types of stores have a lot of aisles, supermarkets often place large, attention-grabbing displays at end of their aisles invigorate their store layouts.

Melissa Gonzalez, brand activation & pop-up architect at The Lionesque Group echoes this advice and says that setting up “speed bumps” in-store is a good way to keep shoppers intrigued. These bumps can be “well merchandised outfits, deeper information about key product offerings, an interactive element such as touch screens or augmented reality like Perch Interactive.”

Sephora does this really well. Many of its stores are punctuated with speedbumps to stop people in their tracks. In the example below, you’ll see an interactive display attached to a shelf, that encourages guests to take a hair quiz. In addition to creating an interactive experience, the touchscreen display also acts like a speedbump slows down guests as they browse the shelf. This helps ensure that they don’t skip over the products in the display.

Try to do something similar in your own retail design efforts. Add speed bumps or elements that would give shoppers a break from monotonous displays and aisles. Doing so encourages your customers to slow down their pace so they can view more of your products.

Source: Wikipedia

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