What Is Retail Design?

Retail design is a creative business discipline that has emerged with the development of chain stores; it is an interdisciplinary discipline that combines the design and retail space construction of several different professional fields. It is a practice-based professional approach to architecture and interior design, but it also includes interior decoration elements, graphic design, ergonomics and advertising. It is a professional field combining business science and design art. Due to the market's large demand for retail space layout, retail design is now a very professional independent discipline. Famous retail universities in the United States and Europe have set up a specialty called "retail design."

Retail design

Retail design is a professional approach based on architecture and interior design, but it also includes interior decoration elements, graphic design, ergonomics and advertising. It is a professional field combining business science and design art.

Since the main purpose of retail space is to store and sell products to consumers, the design of the space must be able to bring consumers a pleasant and relaxed shopping experience. Therefore, the retail space must be a specially designed product.

The space must also be "customized" for the merchandise being sold; for example, a bookstore needs many large shelves to accommodate small-volume products and display them in a certain category; and a clothing store needs more open space to fully display the product .

Retail design began in the mid-19th century with interior design services provided to stores, such as Bon Marche and Printemps in Paris, followed by Marshall Fields in Chicago, Marshall Fields in New York, Macy's in New York, Selfridges in London, etc. . These earlier

Due to a long period of time in China, the development of modern retail industry has caused serious shortage of related design service industries. Well-known colleges and universities, including Tongji, have no major in retail design. Only the newly established LaSalle College offers this major, and interior design-related magazines have failed to pay attention to this major. Magazines focusing on retail design, including VM + SD (Visual Merchandising + Store Design), Chain Store Age, and so on are emerging abroad. This also formed a deficiency in the whole country from theory to cognition. Domestic retail owners are even used to the embarrassment of asking advertising companies to design store images for them, because most owners think that the brand image is right to find an advertising company.

The absence of professional retail design companies in China is also extremely serious. Most design companies regard department store design and clothing store design as retail store design. In fact, at present, Chinese department stores basically take space rental as a business and cannot be classified as a modern retail industry. Most domestic clothing store designs only involve brand image; product layout and display have not reached the level related to performance.

The types of retail design that face real retail include: Department stores, Electronics, Food retailing / supermarkets, Hospitality (restaurants, fast food, beauty, massage, etc.), Mass merchants, Service Retailers (Including banks, insurance, mailing, repairs, etc.), clothing specialty stores Specialty apparel, non-apparel specialty stores (such as toy stores, baby supplies, book stores, stationery stores, pet stores, etc.), Window displays, all product areas (taken from VMSD website).

The content of retail design should also include space and visual design services: not only space design, such as store facades, interior moving line layout design, shelf display prop design, lighting, etc .; but also environmental visual design, such as: Shop tips, environmental decoration patterns, various labels, POP and more. When it comes to POP, it is not actually a piece of poster paper that is often used in discount sales in China.

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It is a series of display at the "Point Of Purchase", including posters, but also merchandise displays, lighting and so on. There are only a few international design companies that carry out this kind of business in China, such as Gritto Consulting (New York, Shanghai), Kellyson (Seattle, Shanghai), etc.

After 20 years of development in Chinese retail, there is an urgent need for retail design to enhance brand competitiveness. Mainly, retail design can help companies deal with the following issues:

· Start a new retail business, or make a breakthrough or transformation. · Insufficient customer awareness of the brand. · Forced into the red sea of price wars. · Lack of new customers, weak business growth, or loss of old customers. · High store cost or image maintenance. Difficult to agree · Image is aging or difficult to distinguish from competitors · New strong competitors are looting the market

These challenges are retail designs that integrate brand strategy and can help owners deal with the problems. Of course, retail design is not a panacea, it is a means of improvement. The company's core strategy can be successfully tackled, and retail design is one of the execution tools of the core strategy.