The brief

To provide a retail concept that takes a display centre for kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms and turns it into a memorable flagship destination for Moben, Sharps and Dolphin customers. To communicate the key competitive difference – fully fitted rooms.

Our solution

To create memories, by developing a concept store with personality, that makes shopping for a kitchen, bedroom or bathroom easy, engaging and informative. We used SHOP our retail communication tool, to develop the approach.

Personality

One of our challenges was to unite the 3 brands with a common language and personality that focused on the core proposition – The fitted room specialist. ‘Fits around you’ was developed to capture both the emotional benefit and the functional benefit.

Education

There were several layers of education, starting with high impact graphics. They provide lifestyle cues, a new tone for the brand messages and drama to the store environment. Customers very often crave detail so a range of communication pieces were used to deliver a further layer of messages. Finally and for the first time in these brands history we even tackled the tricky subject of price.

Engagement – touching the product

One of the most interesting observations when you watch people shop at a homeware store is their reluctance to touch the product. We believe this is one of the most crucial ways to create lasting memories about the brand and, as importantly, keep them in store for longer. A number of strategies were deployed to make mucky finger prints on the door.

Engagement - organising the store

We also completely reconfigured the business end of the store to clearly signpost the different roles of area. We created the information hub, where customers and sales staff share detail, the design hub where customers could configure their own room and, finally the design pod, where for the first time customers could have their room designed in store

Information – appointments & service

Remarkably the one thing that they didn’t say was the one thing the group wanted shoppers to do – book an appointment. A simple solution with significant effect. Secondly one of the key things we needed to communicate was the service proposition. To do this we created the ‘our service’ cube – this logo became the short hand for the full service message. Each section could then be extrapolated out or delivered as a unit. This logo device is now used across channels.

Communication - the sale

Finally in this highly competitive market clear, simple and effective communication of the sale is crucial to the business success. With sales changing on either a monthly or bimonthly basis, personality and engagement are still top of our minds.

Results

We have now rolled this concept out to over 150 stores, including concessions in Next, Laura Ashley and BHS. For confidentiality reasons we can’t reveal more but in every case the POS package has had a positive impact on the KPI’s.