Refurbishing your selling space

Updating a retail space enhances its appeal and engagement to consumers, as well as displaying the retailer’s latest products within a more dynamic and engaging environment. Many retail refurbishments aim to increase floor space, allowing for the display of more products, therefore maximising space and revenue. A store refresh also helps compete effectively against similar stores and allows businesses to reinvent themselves with a fresh new look and feel.

Coordinating a retail refurbishment can be challenging, particularly for the smaller business with only a few, or maybe just one, premises to consider. There are a few critical points to consider when planning a shop refit.

1. Layout: Some businesses decide to appoint an architect to help them make the most of the space available. This may well be beyond the budget of the smaller retailer however and there are plenty of other sources of ideas for how to update the layout of your selling space, from the internet (many shops have 360 views on Google) to simply visiting other shops of a similar size and type.
2. Floors: When thinking about flooring you need to consider what sort of products you sell as weight and the need to move things around will affect your choice. The need to clean effectively and quickly will also be a factor. A light colour carpet may be attractive but will stain easily.
3. Ceilings: Your customers may not look up often, but what they see when they do matters. Ceiling height can have a significant impact on the feel of your shop. It also needs to be safe, as does your floor.
4. Lighting: Enhancing your displays with suitable lighting that is bright and bold enough for customers to comfortably check out your products without being too much of an intense glare, and stylish.
5. Customers: Catering to your customer’s needs and preferences has to be a priority. What age group do you cater for? It may be that you need to accommodate mothers push chairs and be suitable for disabled people in wheelchairs. A shop fitting is a big investment so you may want to carry out some customer research to find out what they would like to see when they visit your business and ensure your renovation is going to be effective.

Once a general design and strategy is in place appointing someone to oversee the works will ensure a consistent approach to materials and quality of work will make the implementation of a plan more effective. As you can tell from the list above the work of refitting a shop covers a lot of different trades, so working with a multi trade provider who can work with you to agree the scope of the works and coordinate the trades required to carry out the work. If you have more than one premises to consider then having one point of contact for all the work will make sure that you have consistent quality of materials and work as well as an understanding of the requirements of the complete plan. Talk to Express Property Services about how we can help and look at our work for Andrews Estate Agents on the Case Studies page.

Categorised in: Property maintenance

This post was written by Express Property Services