Creating Unique Retail Environments to Drive Sales

Far from being focused only on creating individual pieces of furniture or even display systems, ARNO can act as a full-scale shopfitter. This means designing and manufacturing the entirety of a shop’s interior fixtures. Working with ARNO thus allows you to create your own unique retail environments for your store or retail chain from scratch, using any form of visual marketing you desire. And thanks to our focus on highly flexible modular systems, the available space on the shop floor can be used as efficiently as possible – even allowing the layout to be changed to suit whatever the market requires at any given time.

Typically, when fitting shops, the desired layout of the retail floor is often used as the starting point for the design process. The idea is to create bespoke fixtures perfectly fitting the retail environments and the space available. However, thanks to the modular approach which has put ARNO at the top of the industry, prospective floor layouts are much less of a focus for us – though they are still being considered during the design process. This is because the furniture is designed to be used by retailers in a variety of different combinations, allowing for a great number of possible layouts. And since ARNO’s designers, engineers and furniture manufacturing experts work closely together throughout the entire project, you can rest assured that our designs are always feasible, given the available resources, and practical in any and all retail environments. Thus, it is entirely possible to work out a fitting fixture design without being too heavily limited by the space available. In order to achieve the perfect fittings for your retail environments, a number of fixture-specific aspects have to be taken into consideration:

• How can the store’s brand and/or the product brands be conveyed?
• Can the furniture design alone create effective brand environments?
• What construction shape is most effective at gathering attention, yet also easy to use in day-to-day operations?
• Which material supports the fixture’s effect on the shopper most effectively?
• How can the fixture be designed as modular without compromising the desired effect on shopping environments?

Graphical design and practical furniture construction go hand in hand here. For example, the shopping environments of luxury brands could be supported by using tastefully minimalist colour schemes in combination with noticeably high-quality fixture materials. For additional shopper attention, the same brand display might be fashioned using unusual shapes drawing the customer’s eye. After all, retail environments are shaped by the actual nature of the fixtures every bit as much as by the store layout.

Once the modular fixtures have been created, they need to be placed in a way that creates effective retail environments. Thanks to ARNO’s over 85 years of experience, we can help you with layout decisions based on both the latest in retail design and point of sale design research as well as our own observations gathered over multiple generations. From a purely practical standpoint, we can also assemble and install all of your new fixtures on-site according to the previously determined layouts of your retail environments. One of the most important aspects of any given shop floor layout is the question of how to exploit the available space most cost-efficiently. However, this is not the only question that needs to be considered at this stage. Others include:

• How can customers be enticed to move around the floor in a way that is conducive to the increase of sales?
• How can sections featuring particular types of products be organised so they seem sensibly organised, while also coaxing the shopper to see the entirety of the store?
• How can visual marketing be incorporated strategically at key points in store environments?
• In multi-brand retail environments, how can the shop in shop concept be integrated most effectively?

One of the most important aspects to shaping effective retail environments is embodied in the first two points. Generally speaking, the entire layout of a store should be organised enough to not seem chaotic, but planned in a way that maximises travel distances for customers. The reason for this is simple: The shopper should ideally be enticed to not simply enter the store, find the product they need and leave. As long as the customer is in the store, they should be enticed to buy additional goods – and one way of achieving this is by setting up the floor plan in a way which forces the shopper to look at a variety of products while walking around these retail environments. Of course, ARNO does not only design fixtures in such a way as to increase their marketing potential. Before on-site installation, we can also help you devise an effective floor plan for your retail environments, as we – of course – have intimate knowledge of the effects our fixtures have on the shopper. Thus, we know how to best employ our furniture.

As one of the leading shopfitting companies from the UK, Germany, Turkey, China and the US, we combine creative design experts, accomplished engineers and experienced project managers into a one-stop shopfitting solution. We are able to help you with any and all of the steps necessary for creating your unique retail environments, from design and manufacture to shipping and installation. And thanks to our in-house organisation, communication is always quick, both within our team and between ARNO and you. Furthermore, we have extensive experience creating retail environments for shops in various countries. All ARNO Group offices are staffed with native speakers of English and many other world languages. Furthermore, our engineers are familiar with the requirements of the regional infrastructure as well as government regulations and import duties. Once production of your fixture systems has been finalised, they can be shipped to your stores or partner stores without delay. Working this way allows us to react quickly, even on short notice, and to reduce shipping times to a minimum, always delivering on schedule. Our highly efficient order picking system allows us to ship the exact fixture combinations you require to the exact place where you need them – world-wide.

As is evident from our extensive portfolio of successful projects, ARNO can handle brands, products and shops in any given area of industry, from electronics to hygiene products. In addition to this, we have worked on serial production projects of widely varying scopes:

• Individual displays (including POS, POP)
• Shop in shop systems
• Entire stores and chains

Particularly in the area of shop in shop systems, stores or even chains and franchises, ARNO has successfully built retail environments that combine creative vision, convenient practical usage and highly effective marketing concepts. In terms of the scale of the retail environments, individual displays are clearly the smallest space to work with. Free standing display units, wall displays or the like do not technically constitute retail environments as such, since these are individual displays.

Thus, shop in shop systems are probably the smallest retail environments to be worked with. Such systems usually occupy only a relatively small space, meaning that the position of individual displays and the length and shape of pathways through the shop in shop is very limited. Thus, every aspect of the design needs to be thought out, to allow the brand identity to effectively differentiate itself from the surrounding shop floor. On the largest scale, ARNO has successfully worked both with single-brand stores as well as with multi-brand ones. The difference between our approaches to these two types of retail environments is, of course, the brand identity: In a single-brand store, the brand identity is conveyed throughout the entirety of all of the fixtures. At the same time, multi-brand environments need to be able to perform a challenging feat: Conveying the store’s own identity, while simultaneously leaving enough room for individual brands to unfurl theirs without being negatively influenced by either other brands or the store brand itself.

Our flexible and experienced team can create retail environments large and small, with a focus on creative yet feasible designs and cost-efficient manufacture of nonetheless noticeably high-quality fixtures. Working closely with you, we can either fashion fixtures based on your own designs or provide you with everything you need from the initial design steps to on-site installation. Contact us from anywhere in the world and let us help you create retail environments that will drive sales and leave your customers asking for more.