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From stagnant growth to increased competition to an outdated image, there are a variety of reasons for retailers to spruce up their stores. But just exactly how can a modernized store design help you increase sales?

"Change is the key word - always," said Greg Gorman of GMG Design. "It is vitally important to frequently mix up the retail environment to give your store a fresh look."
Mixing it up can be as simple as relocating focal fixture units throughout the store and updating merchandising concepts, all the way up to a comprehensive remodeling from the ground up.
Certainly, the latter requires substantially more money and a great deal more time, but since you're committed to the business, why not ensure that your investment continues to be profitable? According to Gorman, when retailers remodel - and when they do it right, they typically experience anywhere from a 17- to 35-percent sales increase.
When developing a new store design or even a remodel, Gorman warns against the temptation to copy the competition, especially if they're already successful.
"Instead, develop something new and apply it to your store. Don't try to look like the competition; rather, strive to develop an image and personality that defines your store as a destination and a brand," he recommended.
To begin the process, Gorman suggests that retailers critique other stores in their community. By thoroughly assessing your own business and how it competes with others in the neighborhood, you can begin the process of creating a store design that literally speaks to the customers and therefore, distinguishing your store. Make it stand out from the pack.
Beyond the traditional lighting, fixturing, and overall color schemes, what can turn your retail environment into a shopping mecca that captures consumers' attention and entices them to spend, spend, spend?
The answer, according to Shook Kelley, a design firm with offices in Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C., is perception design.
"The process of perception design is not about the rules and how it should be," explained co-founder Kevin Kelley. "Rather, it is a concept that starts with the consumer's perception. And it is that perception that allows retailers to take store design to a new level."
To create a dynamic retail space, Shook Kelley's designers do much more than examine the space they have to work with, they devote many hours to "studying, observing, and decoding how people eat, shop, live, and convene," explained Kelley.

Laying the Groundwork
Your store's design should create a dialogue between the environment and your customers. Everything from the fixtures to the color scheme, to the product packaging to the advertising should speak to the customer about the retail brand. Think Williams-Sonoma or West Point Market. Customers who visit these stores immediately understand what their brands stand for. Williams-Sonoma's store design evokes consumers' desire to cook well. Showcasing the best kitchen products in an enticing design makes customers feel as if they have just stepped into a welcoming kitchen. Often, the smell of a recently baked item adds further ambiance, and the staff is approachable, willing to explain how the products can make anyone successful at cooking or baking. Similarly, at West Point Market, customers are transported into a food lover's paradise where unique high-quality product is combined with great customer service for an overall memorable experience. The Williams-Sonoma and West Point Market brands are reinforced by what customers experience once they're inside the store.
Core competencies will drive the store design of the future, so it is important that you as a retailer realize what your core competency is in order to create a store design that will influence your customers. In today's competitive world, Kelley believes that a store design that focuses on image instead of one that butts heads with the competition based on traditional product breadth, pricing, and service is the design that will win customers' hearts and open their pocketbooks.
"Competing on brand image is much more effective than competing on square footage, service, or product breadth. Most clients have already maximized these elements," he added.
Using a recent client as an example, Kelley noted how Fry's, a Phoenix-area grocery store that typically competed on price, endeavored to make changes in order to compete with their competition, which included convenience stores, drugstores, restaurants, and category killers. Shook Kelley showed them how to compete on the lifestyle front - an arena in which their competition was weak. By creating a 100,000-square-foot store with departments ranging from food to office furniture to patio furniture and beyond, the store design proved to be provocative. They created a new patterned way to walk through the grocery store as if it is "a constellation."
Kelley said, "Where most grocers think of merchandising layouts in terms of linear inches, we used a fixturing plan that helped develop neighborhoods."
And the response was good. Kelley recalled a comment from an elderly couple who was visiting the store during the grand opening.
"They referred to the store as 'more robust and richer than Wal-Mart, more humane and less military.' They added that they felt the slightly higher prices were worth it because they had a better experience," he said.
To help begin the process of designing your store, Kelley encourages you to relate your store design to your customers' expectations.
"Basically, Brand = Self," explained Kelley. "Once retailers realize exactly how their customers define themselves, the challenge is then to replicate that definition by creating that brand image in the store. The consumers in the geographical area where Fry's is located are all about casual living, so we tried to recreate that feeling inside the store. This was a radical new way for a grocer to think about merchandising, but by using colors that suggest casual living along with warm Southwestern materials, and by creating little lifestyle vignettes that make customers feel as if they're outdoors on a patio lazily enjoying life, we were able to create a store design that communicated to their customers."
According to Kelley, you need to abandon the traditional focus on the message about the brand (for example, "We offer the lowest prices anywhere in town"), and communicate by creating authentic brand experiences that consumers want to be immersed in. Kelley refers to these brand experiences as "lifestyle reflections." Fry's customers certainly felt as if they were living a particular lifestyle, just as customers who visit a Whole Foods store will feel "a sense of enlightenment, a feeling that there is an alternative way, a belief that there is an answer for a better way of living out there."
"What we try to do is reinforce those images through store design," Kelley explained. "There isn't just one thing that creates the brand experience - it is a combination from fixturing to lighting to colors to product packaging, to signage, and even the employees."
While consumers may not consciously realize that they are experiencing these "lifestyle reflections," when customers visit a Whole Foods store, they feel as if they're part of a community. Perhaps it is the placement of the department fixturing that helps present a fresh marketplace feeling, or the signage that helps direct and educate customers in an unassuming manner. When it is successful, it is subtle, but there is always an "ah-ha" moment, a point at which the consumer experiences and therefore, understands that brand.

The Process of Redesign
The first phase of the redesign process is to examine your brand to define how you compete in the market segment. To create a store design that will meet your consumers' expectations, ask yourself who you are and what you stand for - are you the low-price leader, the place one can find anything and everything one could possibly need for the kitchen, the organic food retailer, or the upscale specialty food retailer?
Once you've determined your preferred brand signature, the next step is to develop a strategy that will help you create that brand experience - for example, a store design that invokes the organic lifestyle. This process will encompass a variety of disciplines ranging from business to science to design. Using the "organic lifestyle" as an example, retailers must align all aspects of their business with that brand. Lighting, fixturing, color, even the employees - all must work in tandem to create that total brand picture. Though it sounds like a relatively easy task, as Kelley points out, retailers often don't realize that they deliver contradictory brand messages.
"There needs to be consistency from the environment to the advertising," Kelly explained. "The advertising department must speak with the retailing department to ensure that the two areas are not contradictory."
Kelley points out the discrepancy between Target's advertising and what consumers actually experience when they come into the store.
"The advertising is fun, but the store does not often deliver on that advertising promise. Whereas, the advertising for Ikea is more indicative of what a consumer would experience when they visit. Their advertising claims that shopping at Ikea is 'unboring.' They don't overstate their brand in the advertising, but keep it aligned with what consumers will experience when they shop there," he added.
Psychology is another integral part of store design. If you want to increase traffic in the bakery, the area's aesthetics will definitely help make your customers feel comfortable, but what will really skyrocket sales in the department is greeting customers with a waft of baking cinnamon bread. However, utilizing aromas would not be the best method to increase sales in the sushi department, whereas employing an Asian sushi chef dressed accordingly would be a better choice.
On the design side, you must analyze your lighting, flooring materials, symmetry, and composition as they relate to your brand message. Kelley notes that one of his biggest challenges is helping retailers rethink their overall store plans.
"We try to get them thinking in a lifestyle mentality," he said. "This is a great challenge for retailers because many organize their stores like they do their garages."
In today's world, Kelley believes that this method is passe. People are looking for inspiration; they want ways to live a convenient life. While most retailers think of store design in terms of merchandising layouts and linear feet, Shook Kelley focuses on a fixturing plan that helps retailers develop "neighborhoods," or "mind-set zones." For instance, in the meat department, consumers typically think about quality and safety. In the produce department, they consider freshness, and in the tabletop department, they muse about lifestyle entertaining. To help customers feel comfortable within these zones, you should use lighting, fixturing, and colors that evoke these mind-sets. In the produce department, you could stack up wooden crates to lend the impression that the produce is fresh from the farm. In the tabletop section, lighting and home-style fixturing can help create a "comforts-of-home" feeling, and in the meat department, stainless steel fixturing conveys a safe, sterile environment.
"Color is an important aspect as well," said Kelley. "The right color can make the food taste great, while the wrong color can make the consumer think of fast and cheap foods."
Take yellow as an example.
"In the eyes of the consumer, yellow is a fast color, and is often associated with fast food that is cheap and often synthetic," he said. "Therefore, we don't like to see food near bright yellow colors.
Instead, we like earth tones to conjure up thoughts of the source of the food."
The process is repeated within each store area because customers have different expectations as they move from department to department. By understanding what consumers expect when they walk into a department, you can better respond to their 'feelings' and thereby, create a design that will make them feel comfortable in that environment.
Creating a Lifestyle Feeling
Consumers crave great experiences and lifestyle retailing is a concept that continues to prove popular as it fulfills those expectations. This type of retailing draws consumers in and makes them feel as if they belong to an entire lifestyle - whether it is an adventurous or a socially conscious one.
Kelley also applauds the change from stores where things are piled high warehouse style to one that is more lifestyle in nature, "stores that are evocative of the source, revealing where the product comes from, and creating an authentic farmer's market feeling," he said. "Most customers come into a grocery store with a list. What retailers need to do is inspire them and help them become more of an authority on how to live." Such vignettes could be as simple as bringing together the appropriate products for a Healthy Foods for Your Kids Display, for example.
Further helping create that 'lifestyle' feeling is the inclusion of residential furniture in the retail environment. This trend began in the department stores in the late '80's when "basic furniture designs were fabricated in different sizes to best display apparel, homegoods, etc.," explained Gorman. What home furniture does is "warm the environment as compared to all the typical metal slotted racks and hard, cold metal gondolas."
Especially for retailers who sell kitchenware or other homegoods, a depiction of a home atmosphere is always better received.
"Even in a store that uses contemporary wooden or wire mesh chrome shelves, the addition of key focal points - furniture - to offer contrast is a good idea," explained Gorman. "And, these new additions can be any color. For example, in Clementine's Kitchen in Del Oaks Rey, Calif., we added a bright blue old-style cupboard unit to display merchandise. It complements the store well and doesn't have too much of an eclectic feeling. In fact, based on the color and design difference, it serves as a major focal point."
This cupboard located approximately eight feet inside the front door partially blocks the view into the store, inciting customers' curiosity and inviting them in to discover what is on the other side of the unit.
Coffee cafes successfully capitalized on the creation of this feeling after realizing that their customers desire a comfortable environment, a place where they can spend time enjoying their cup of coffee, reading a book, listening to music, or conversing with friends. By immersing their customers in a living room atmosphere, they immediately transfer them back home where they feel comfortable and thus, they equate the cafe with comfort and want to return.

Successful Communication
To create a successful store design, ask yourself what your brand means beyond price, variety, and service. Does it have emotional value, cause-related value, or community value? Once you decide what your brand stands for, the next question to ask is whether your store design communicates properly with your customers. Communicating to your customers via store design is truly the way of the future. Fresh paint can definitely refresh your store, but as consumers demand more from their shopping experiences, retailers are challenged to create a whole new world of sensory shopping that speaks directly to them, so look around your store today and evaluate what you're saying to your customers.

Greg Gorman of GMG Design Inc. may be contacted at 314-644-2590.
Kevin Kelley of Shook Kelley may be contacted at 310-659-9482.