Wreaking Retail Havok in Prosser!

Ah, yes, your friendly Decorating & Display Diva has touched down like a tornado again, happily rearranging spaces from here to kingdom come and wreaking havok across the land! As one of my crew members & traveling companions said, "I'm 'Wreak', that one's 'and', & Deb is 'Havok' personified!" ;o) Love ya, girls....

I am anxious to share the redesign of Hogue Cellars with you all....but I have 250 photos and it is NOT easy choosing the right ones to illustrate Before/After concepts! If I tried to include them ALL, I'd have a blog post worthy of Tolstoy. I could call it "The War and Peace of Retail Design", I guess...but you'd be bored and Blogger would implode. SO, I will have to tackle this in phases.

Take a look at that sketch of Hogue Cellars retail shop & tasting bar. Front door is mid-right, tasting bar is lower left. Cashwrap is the 'C' and 'I' shaped counters in the upper center. Just about everything else shown is shelving, cabinets, slatwall, etc - built-in units. Got your bearings? OK! This post will include shots of the upper right quadrant.

When you walked into Hogue BEFORE Deb and her marvelous 'Decorating & Display Diva's Crew' wreaked havok, here is what you saw when you turned right:

It's not horrifying or anything, it's just not the best it can be.
A few minor changes, and here is what it looks like NOW:

Clean, Crisp, Well-stocked. Organized. Upscale. The best it can be!
Now, the details:

Before & After
Side by side, you can see the differences in the slatwall arrangement.
This area formerly held food & wine accessories on a wire rack, and logo apparel on slatwall. We removed the rack, and the food, and focused this area completely on logo and wine accessories -some of which ARE logo. Before, there was one item in each style of shirt & cap out here - big no-no. 'One-sies' look like they are leftovers, end-of-line merchandise. Customers won't buy it because they think you have had it forever and ran out of other sizes. We filled it up with all four styles of shirt in all four sizes (they hang S-M-L-X) and it looks like brand new, fresh merchandise. Did you even see the caps in the before shot? Nope. Now there are multiples, easy to see & grab. The accessories are corralled into baskets that fit into shelf units. (Each pulls out like a drawer for ease in stocking, no wasting time stacking on a shelf. Expedite the process for your staff!!!) Now it's shoppable.

Moving to the next wall (top of map), we saw this before:

Again, having just one of an item out on shelves is detrimental to it's sales potential. One box each of six varieties of crackers, one of each varietal of wine....nuh uh. It looks like leftovers, spoiled and soiled. The thing was, there were boxes and boxes and shelves FULL of these products out in the retail storage area. My trusty helpers loaded up and hauled it all in, I organized it into categories and arranged it onto the shelves (pasta, sweets, savories, spices, oils, fish, etc.). Books sell best when you can see the covers. (OF COURSE we have all been told "Don't judge a book by it's cover" - but we still DO it!!!) The previous arrangement of over 30 cookbooks was removed and those books that were alike (not many) were placed into displays by color, theme, content, etc. Books sell much better when cross-merchandised.
And here is the result:

On the left you see a counter area. I actually used the exact same merchandise that they already had there, I just added more of it and propped it in a way that was interesting. In the before shot, you can see that it was flat, on a checkered tablecloth - which was a cute idea, but I went for a more 'Williams-Sonoma' look than Papa Luigi's restaurant. Bushel baskets hold lots of pasta, the ceramic bowls hold sauces, and the colanders and cookbooks add interest:

A few employees looked at the display the next morning and asked "Is this new? Did we have sauces before?" This kind of reaction is typical!!! Sometimes you have to shake it up to see it. And as of today, that wall-hung candleabra is gone, along with all of the backstock, along with a bunch of other merchandise. It's 'flying out the door', I am told.

;o) Gotta' love that!

Next time, we'll continue moving around the shop counter-clockwise....

Earth Day

So, Earth Day has once again come and gone. Before the big day, everyone from Oprah to Arnold was touting about going GREEN. There were green issues of popular magazines like Domino and Vanity Fair. As the day approached, my husband and I began to get excited. "Maybe people are finally waking up and getting it," I said. "The small efforts really do make a difference." Earth Day came and went, but after the rhetoric, it seems as though we are back to business as usual. The green splash has reduced to ripples on the community surface. I feel compelled to critique the lack of follow-through from these "leaders" of the community.
The lackadaisical attitude isn't just in Hollywood; Tampa has more that its fair share. I do have to say that I give Kudos to Mayor Pam Iorio, who has traded in her luxury sedan for a more eco friendly Honda hybrid, but is it enough?
We attended the Earth Day celebration at Lowry Park and I was impressed with a few booths, but the city's showing was very--rehearsed. I was looking for literature on recycling and information on what steps the city of Tampa was taking towards becoming more eco-friendly. Where is the solar power info? Why can't we recycle cardboard in the city? Where can I learn to make a rain barrel and is there an incentive for these home improvements? I had questions that I needed answers to. When I saw the solid waste recycling tent and other city recycling booths I bagan searching the tables for literature that would quench my thirst for information. Unfortunately, I left the booths more frustrated and thirsty than I came. Sure I had a nifty mouse pad made of tires, but no one there could tell me which plastics we recycle here and which we can't. The only hard information the tables had were how children could make paper hats from paper, and that was in the leaflet from 2003. I began seeing that all of the literature was from around 2003--have we not changed anything or even felt that change is important? We are not the only people who want to make Tampa a Green city and a leader in the state, so why does it feel like all of the momentum is just slipping away?
Tell me what you think.