Retail Fixtures – Combining Design and Purpose into Unique Shopping Experiences

One of the most demanding tasks of contemporary shopfitting is to entice the customer with interesting display designs that draw attention to themselves and to the product – without hampering the actual shopping experience. Retail fixtures featuring overly complex designs, which make interacting with the stocked items more inconvenient can have a significant negative impact on sales. After all, customers simply prefer to not have to search for an item on the highest shelves nor have to wrestle it from awkward product holders or hangers. This is why high-quality ARNO retail fixtures are always customised for the product at hand.

Though shoppers certainly do not like interacting with inconvenient retail fixtures, this is an important aspect from the store owner’s point of view as well. After all, during the lifetime of a store display, the furniture may be moved around frequently to suit changing retail space layouts. Furthermore, the fixtures need to be re-stocked and cleaned on a regular basis. Certainly, neither store owners nor product creators enjoy looking at grimy displays stocked with unorganised inventory, simply because the cleaning staff and shop assistants consider interacting with the fixtures to be too bothersome For customers and store owners both, this necessitates certain design decisions: Retail fixtures should generally feature displays, racks, hangers or holders customised for the products which they are intended to showcase. This means that the dimensions of the fixtures need to conform to those of the products while hangers or holders need to be customised to fit the particular product as well. Of course, the position of the items on display also needs to be taken into consideration, especially when retail fixtures are employed to display multiple products at once. For example, when designing an interactive video game console wall display, the monitor element naturally needs to be mounted at eye level. However, this still leaves open the question of whether video game boxes should be displayed underneath the actual console, along the sides of the display or in-between monitor and console. This decision can have a significant impact on the visuals as well as the usability of the display fixtures depending on how customers are expected to interact with the individual items. One particular decision that might serve to make the lives of store owners and assistants easier is designing retail fixtures to be inherently mobile. This could mean that they are built in such a way as to allow quick and easy disassembly or layout customisation – such as is possible with gridwall or slatwall units or roller-mounted floor fixtures. In the most extreme cases, such as when employing fixtures along the shop in shop concept, this could mean multiple retail display cases, racks, holders or shelving units which can easily be disassembled and combined to form unique store display solutions.

With over 85 years of experience in the industry, ARNO is one of the most renowned purveyors of bespoke retail fixtures and point of sale displays. Utilising contemporary retail design principles, we have managed to create a portfolio of highly successful designs for various companies and brands ranging from jewellery to electronics. This has provided us with the experience necessary to apply our knowledge and expertise to a variety of products, brands and retail environments. In combination with the fact that ARNO is organised to provide for all necessary steps of the display design, manufacturing and shipping processes in-house, this makes us one of the most flexible shopfitters available, trumping even most shopfitting companies from the UK. Thanks to our staff of native English speakers, language-based misunderstandings are unthinkable, allowing us to concentrate fully on the design of your retail fixtures and displays according to your specific wishes. Since all our designs are created by a team that includes designers as well as professional carpenters and architects, all our designs are entirely feasible from a technical standpoint, no matter how complex they might seem.

With our extensive experience, we can offer you retail displays or entire modular display systems featuring a variety of fixtures depending on the products and the spatial situation:

• Slatwall and gridwall units
• Hangers and holders
• Shelves, and racks

Having built a reputation for high-quality designs, we only work with the most high-performance materials, such as wood, glass, acrylic or metal. Cardboard is not a material we ordinarily work with, since our high-quality designs may not only suffer from noticeably lower-quality materials, but also require reliable structural stability. After all, ARNO retail fixtures are meant to last, so you do not have to replace them on a regular basis. As a nice side effect, our fixtures and displays can be fashioned to be highly adaptable and modular without incurring a significant amount of wear and tear over time.

In general, wall displays such as shelving units provide the great benefit of allowing the horizontal and vertical space on store walls to be used efficiently. As an example, a gridwall or slatwall system might not be able to use the wall’s height in its entirety, since most customers will not be able to reach the upper parts of the display. However, this additional space for retail fixtures allows for the placement of signs and prominent logos which, because of their height, can be seen from almost any point of the store. From a purely practical perspective, wall displays allow for more massive or more playful designs, as attaching the fixture to a wall provides a significant amount of stability.

Furniture that has to stand firm under its own weight, either as free standing displays or as part of a series of floor or countertop shelving units, needs to take structural aspects into consideration. While these retail fixtures offer the advantage of being highly mobile, their construction needs to be planned according to architectural principles. Top-heavy glass retail display cases, for example, must be carefully counter-weighted without increasing their overall load to such an extent as to make them inconvenient to move around the store. Free standing and countertop fixtures can be fashioned in a variety of forms and may be fitted with anything from displays, product holders and clothing hangers to mannequins. Some of the most advanced designs combine many of these possibilities together to create an entire brand microcosm. For example, a single retail fixture might include mannequins showcasing the clothing to be sold as well as carefully placed shelves for easy product accessibility.