There is a science behind everything, yes, even lamps. Do you pay attention to the feeling customers have when they come to your storefront? The ambience your store generates? Do you know what that ambience does to your sales? Does it keep people in your store longer? Does it help drive perceived value and increase margins? Does it cause people to buy more product, or come to your store more often?
While these are just some of the analytic questions that are important in the science of retail, they can all stem from the ambience in your retail space. But what creates ambience? Sure, it’s the colors and style of items used within, but generally, the actual feeling is created by the lighting you decide on. Utilizing our wide selection of wholesale lamps can be a cost effective way to add ambience. In fact, when you start breaking down what lighting creates the best ambience, lamps become the obvious winner. From floor and table lamps, to themed accent lamps, they provide the best lighting option because they come in all shapes, sizes and styles.
Think about the stores you go to and why you like them. Aside from the products they carry, how do you feel when you’re in the store? Is it warm and inviting? Is it a friendly place where you find yourself being comfortable? Maybe it’s just the opposite for some stores you visit, but do you even wonder why? More importantly, from a retailer’s perspective, have you ever considered these things for your own store?
When it comes to retailing it doesn’t have to be hard, you just have to start paying attention and being creative. The world is a saturated place, and for retailers looking for a leg up in a stiff market, details matter. Here are a few easy ways to start looking at the science of your store in a different way.
The 3 Ways to Consider
- Take an afternoon and walk your competitors floors to see how you feel and how they use lighting best. Even better, have a friend or family member come with you and note their perspective as well. After each visit make notes based on the same criteria so you can compare apples to apples. You’ll find having a retailer’s perspective and a consumer’s perspective can help reveal helpful aspects both neither caught.
- Just like you might do for the competitor’s stores mentioned above, you should do for your storefront too. It’s helpful to get fresh faces and minds in your store and ask them how they feel and how they react. Create a simple survey with some of the questions asked in this article about ambience and see what types of answers you get back. Maybe even running a store promotion to ask your customer’s opinions is appropriate.
- Lastly, using your store cameras can be the most effective tool for analyzing store strategy. Take some time and watch a few days at a time. Like coaches for a sports team, they study film to find tendencies, weaknesses, and strengths. Do your customers always go right when they come in the doors? What display/product seems to catch their interest first once inside? If you move it to a new place, do consumer respond the same? Do they go to these places in your store because of a message, a color, great lighting, etc? From store cameras you can see trends in people’s actions and capitalize on them. Do you have a new product, well don’t put it on the left side if everyone in your store walks to the right side. Change the lighting and displays to see if it affects traffic patterns and purchase volume. Try new lamps with certain settings to see if your perceived value goes up. The insights gained can be endless.
Hopefully the information provided here is useful and enlightening. We want all our retail partners to benefit from our products, information and experience. We take lighting for granted because we have such an abundance of it all the time. Whether it’s sunshine or one of our wholesale lamps, we always need it around. As one of the country’s largest wholesale lamp distributors, AHS Lighting has been helping retailers increase sales per square foot for over 35 years, and we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
In future posts we’ll talk about selecting the right type of lamp for your retail space with the help of Big Data! For instance, you might be selling our wholesale vintage lamps to a specific demographic, but do you know if they’d prefer to have a table, floor or accent lamp. Do you know what colors your demographic is looking for most? Do you know how to remove old, non-selling product and replace with in-demand product(s) based on data? Well, if not, subscribe as we ramp up our blog with help retailer tips and tricks around the use of lighting and lamps.
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Thanks for reading, -AHS Team