What do tea bags, steak and skincare have in common? Not much, except for when it comes to retailing them; they’re all small products - and small products can be tricky to make stand-out in-store.
Some retail products are big; like cars, suitcases and washing machines. Some retail products are medium-sized, but can be inflated to look bigger; like tents, clothes and bedding. And some products are just straight-up small, no matter what.
An integral part of any store’s success is how well the customer can see the product, and ideally, well before they enter the store. The bigger the product, the easier that is to achieve. But when the product you're selling is smaller than your hand, then we have a design challenge on our hands. We need to reverse the approach and go from a push-product strategy to a pull-product strategy.
Where the push-product strategy pushes the product into the customers line of sight, the pull-product strategy lures the customer toward it.
So, what does that look like in-store? Well, speaking of tea, steak and skincare, we think these are three retailers have done a stellar job of solving the small-product retail challenge.
LET THE PRODUCT SHINE - TEA TOO
Tea connoisseurs have loved T2 since it started in 1996 for its huge and dedicated product range. But teabags are small and at a glance, it’s pretty difficult for anyone to tell an English Breakfast blend apart from a Lapsang Souchong mix.
T2 have tackled this issue with a maelstrom of colour. Whilst tea itself, looseleaf or bagged, doesn’t vary greatly in looks, how T2 package it does. Bright boxes, each coloured coded to each product, turn their shelves into a rainbow. Then to compound the effect, T2 swathes their stores, from the walls to the fixtures, fromt eh floor to the ceiling, in black. This makes the perfect backdrop for any colour to pop against.
Teamed with hyper-focused lighting illuminating the product faces, what started out as little boxes of tea, become a striking spectrum of eye-catching colour. Magic.
SPOTLIGHT FOR THE HIGHLIGHT - VICTOR CHURCHILL
Sydney-based butcher, Victor Churchill, is a family-run business that was established almost 150 years ago, back in 1876. Butcher shops are hardly a new retail category, and they're look is mostly ubiquitous around the world. That was until Victor Churchill came in and gave the humble butcher shop a glow-up.
Their HQ store, located in Woollahra Sydney, is flanked with stone walls, laced with Himalaya-salt rock. The salt crystals offer both an interesting texture, and a sterile surface. The floors are covered in intricate mosaic-tiling. The staff perform their craft behind a spotless, glazed wall, working upon well-oiled, tree-trunk sized, butcher-blocks.
The store’s design elevates the meat game from mundane grocery-shopping, to a luxury-laiden experience. Nowhere is this more apparent than how they present their product. A single steak is placed delicately on its own pedestal, with an army of security cameras are trained toward it. The customer has little choice but to follow their lead and check out exactly what it is they're looking at. Clever.
THE SUM OF ALL PARTS - AESOP
The Aesop retail experience is possibly the single, most-loved, store design in the world - and it's with the added irony that no two stores look the same. Launching back in 1987, Aesop’s retail store aesthetic has continuously zigged where its competition have zagged.
The Aesop range contains a slew of various products, in a multiple of sizes, but one thing with the product stays constant – the packaging. And when lined up side-by-side, shelf-on-shelf, the product’s striped label unites and paints the store with racing stripes which endlessly lap around the store.
Aesop could have left it there, leaving the product's packaging to do the heavy lifting with making a strong, design impact on the customer. But they didn’t. Pushing against the somewhat homogenised look of the packaging, the stores' design are anything but. Stone, timber, granite, mesh, tiles, steel, even cardboard, have been featured in their stores. Customers can sense an Aesop store by its unique look, but the sight of their humble, small brown and white little bottles are instantly recognisable. Genius.
When designing for retail stores, it's critical to work both with the product, and for the product. Everyone always says it, probably because it's true - there is no one size fits all with retail. Brands, products and ranges are as vast and varied as the customer buying it. Recognising that some products need more help than others to shout out from the shelves, means we can identify the right levers to pull to help the small get seen too.
Written by Renée Ballard, ©️ 2024
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