Merchandising of kids store: What is the difficulty
Global retail
Merchandising of kids store: What is the difficulty
The demand for kid's products is stable since clothes and accessories have to be changed often due to the child’s growth and evolution. The economic meltdown has little to no effect on demand because usually, it's improper to save money on children. At the same time, the retailer has another difficulty - rising competition. A business faces a difficult task: to do everything so that the buyer visits just your store. To do this, you have to strengthen your brand and consumers’ awareness by providing a high level of service.
Merchandising is a powerful tool for building customer loyalty since it includes working with the range of products, ease of display, proper navigation, window and trading floor dressing. All this creates a positive shopping experience bit by bit.
Who is the real customer of kid's stores?
Merchandising of kids store is multi-level and demanding. You should make a positive impression not only on the adult customer but also on the main one - the kid.
Parents’ choice of a store is based on how convenient it is for shopping with a child. Accordingly, you have to take this into account when planning and designing the store. The aisles between the fixtures should be spacious, and the cash desks should not be overloaded, the clothes should be ironed well, the sales staff - friendly and helpful.
Lighting should convey a “childish” atmosphere of joy and carelessness. This can be achieved with warm color lamps with a high color rendering index. For showcases, it is better to choose accent lighting.
Another category of customers that kids stores can attract are teenagers. To get older children interested, you can decorate the floor in a techno style or cover the showcases with graffiti, drawings and mannequins in youth clothes.
Conclusion: we are dealing with an indirect target audience and a diverse assortment. When selling products for children, it is necessary to take into account the needs of adults, which complicates the display. It has its own rules that we consider below.
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Zoning in a children's products store
Before the customers enter the store and evaluate the range, they judge it by the appearance in order to figure out this POS price level.
The face of the store is the showcase
If the store is designed for the middle class, showcase popular and inexpensive toys and clothes in the window. If the target audience is people with a high level of income, then the showcase should include exclusive luxury goods or branded clothing.
According to research, more than 70% of impulse purchases are made as a result of looking at a product rather than searching for a specific one. That is why you’d better provide your customers with a fascinating kids store range that is advantageously arranged.
When planning kids store and arranging fixtures, you should take into account the traffic patterns. For this, identify key areas on the trading floor:
- Kid’s apparel and shoes;
- Toys;
- Baby care products.
After the key zones have been identified, it is necessary to carry out the zoning of the trading floor, create the internal logic and rules for the product range display and determine the routes for the movement of visitors.
When arranging goods on fixtures, cross-merchandising should be taken into account – this is the rule of laying out complementary goods next to each other or providing recommendations on the use of complementary items from the product range. Toy collections that offer multiple items or characters will easily generate multi-item purchases in a customer’s shopping cart.
As a rule, the products in a children's store are displayed according to the following principle: items that are bought in the emotion of the moment (toys) are placed in plain sight, and products for targeted purchases (clothing, furniture, strollers) are placed in the back or the center of the floor.
Display in a kids store: convenience, safety and order
Proper display, trading floor decoration, showcases and fixtures used to play one of the key roles in the entire chain operation. Racks and shelves should not obstruct the floor overview. Products are best placed at a height accessible to children. So, most often they use special children's clothing store fixtures. There are high safety requirements for the trading floors of children's products – it is important to avoid sharp corners, unstable structures, and easily breaking glass.
Some principles of merchandising of kids store do not differ from the design of other conception stores, but still, there are some special rules. This applies to the display of baby food. Distributing the product range by age group is a convenient design for the customer. Young parents are often confused when choosing the first food for their baby, therefore, the better the company guides the customers, the more loyal they will be in the future. Be sure to post-manufacturer information leaflets in the baby food area.
Display of toys on the trading floor
Toy merchandising makes it a policy to place the products in the direction of the main customer traffic.
At the beginning of the selection zone, expensive toys should be displayed, and at the end – the cheaper ones. This kids store planning stimulates the sale of expensive products.
You can sort toys by their colour and by series. Use colour to draw attention. Try to line up the vertical one-coloured display on the fixtures.
Expensive items should be clearly visible to parents, not children so that conflicts do not arise. It is better to display the most popular products immediately in the window in order to convince shopping center guests to come in and see the product range.
POS materials play a great role both in navigation on the trading floor and in advertising. Promotional materials are often offered by suppliers, and all the manager has to do is work out their beneficial design. Modern merchandising management programs provide assistance with this.
An example of LEAFIO Planogram Optimization software toy store planogram with consideration to advertising banners location and the fixtures specifics
Often it happens so that a new batch of toys cannot reach the retailer for several months (because they are imported from China or other countries). At the same time, the display can be planned in advance by selecting the floor and fixtures design. Given the supply of new products, the company can launch advertising campaigns and organize promotions in the store.
Well-stocked shelves and showcases make for visual appeal and encourage impulse purchases. To optimize merchandising of kids store chain, managers need a modern tool.
LEAFIO Planogram Optimization is a system that helps to comprehensively manage the display throughout the chain. It provides for developing planograms and monitoring their implementation. For a toy store, the program has the following useful tools:
- Trading floor layout;
- Fixtures designer with ready-made templates;
- An opportunity to plan not only the placement of goods but also promotional materials;
- A mobile application by means of which you can set tasks for managers and receive realogram photos directly at the headquarters.
Except for optimizing operational tasks, LEAFIO Planogram Optimization has a wide block of analytics. In a few clicks, you can get the necessary reports on the display efficiency: ABC analysis, turnover report, and sales per shelf meter.
All this will help you organize the operational activities of the merchandising department at a new level, and make management decisions based on data and numbers as well.
Would you like to organize merchandising in a children's products store to make each square meter profitable? Contact us and we will offer a tool to solve these problems!
Andrew MaxEnd-to-end merchandising process expert
