Retail Design Experts - Welcome to ARNO!

The term “retail design” means different things to different people. Most people think of it simply as “designing shop fittings for a store’s interior”, thinking of the purely visual aspects of the furniture. To ARNO, the term encompasses so much more – we think of retail design as the art of combining aesthetic vision, effective marketing and practical usability. We believe this comprehensive approach to be the key to success in an ever more competitive sales environment – and our more than 85 years of acclaimed work as a professional shopfitting company concurs.

Though working with us provides you with various practical benefits, retail design is still a discipline of design and marketing at heart – after all, how would our order picking and international shipping expertise be of use if our designs were not sound? And while feasibility and cost-efficiency are aspects which are considered at each and every stage in the process, the actual design of a retail store fixture needs to be attractive and effective. However, this is not limited to only visual design. Professional retail design of many scopes – from the individual fixture to the entire interior – is concerned with a number of aspects which might not be immediately obvious, such as:

• Representing the brand identity
• Colour choices (cool or warm?)
• Shapes (simple or complex?)
• Using olfactory or aural elements
• Incorporating video displays

As any good retail designer can attest, representing a brand identity in an engaging manner can be the most important aspect of any retail design concept. After all, brand recognition is one of the most potent drivers of sales both on the web and in the retail space. Thus, your brand needs to be examined and the key aspects of its identity need to be identified. This forms the basis of all ARNO designs. In the case of a single display or SiS system, the two important questions to be answered are: How can the customer be made to perceive these key points of your brand identity, ideally without having to look twice? And how can the design prevent this brand identity from being influenced by the branding of surrounding products? When fitting an entire store’s interior, of course, this last question is not as complicated, since in such a situation, individual brands do not necessarily compete with each other using their individual bespoke fixtures. Instead, the designers and retail shop owners have control over which product is represented in what way and in which position within the retail space.

In our over eight decades of experience in the shopfitting industry, we have noticed that all too often, a business planning to create bespoke fixtures for their products will have one team working on the design of the furniture and another team, perhaps even an independent company, trying to realise this design. More often than not, such designs have proven to be fundamentally infeasible, since the first team – only concerned with the aesthetic design – have failed to consider some of the most important practical aspects:

• Weight-bearing capacity of the material
• Weight of the fixtures themselves
• Overall structural integrity of the display
• Dimensions conducive to being moved
• Possibility of modularisation

In contrast, the ARNO display creation process has designers and marketing experts working hand in hand with engineers, metalworkers, carpenters and other members of the practical professions. This way, we can prevent time-consuming back-and-forth between individual teams and build fixtures which are practical and cost-effective without sacrificing anything in terms of design. Since we already have this major advantage thanks to our comprehensive approach, one of our major areas of expertise is modularisation. This is of particular benefit when designing SiS systems or the entire interior of stores, as it allows you to cost-efficiently use a smaller number of fixtures offering countless options for variation without impeding the effectiveness of the visual marketing. Modular shop fixtures can be combined in any configuration depending on the store layout and the requirements of the products to be put on display. And thanks to our efficient order picking system, the time required for shipping the necessary modular elements to your retail stores is minimised, allowing us to ship on time even at short notice.

While bespoke displays and shop in shop systems allow a business to effectively market its product in practically any environment, companies which market products in their own brand store benefit significantly from having the entire store interior built according to retail design principles. Marketing in such environments does not start at the display level – it starts with the very shape of the stores:

• Zoning and shop layout
• Avenues of movement and key thoroughfares
• Interior lighting and climatic conditions
• Background music and olfactory elements
• Effective placement of products

In short: When fitting an entire retail store’s interior, what matters is not simply the look and feel of individual displays, but the way in which entire fixture systems interact with each other within the shop environment. Here, we work extensively with scientific customer behaviour studies. Some of the most well-known finding of these studies include the fact that customers move more slowly through a store interior when travelling in a counter-clockwise direction, the fact that customers pay significantly more attention to products positioned at eye level and the fact that lighting the back areas of a retail environment more brightly will instinctively entice customers to move there – meaning they will take in more of the store and potentially buy more products. When used to fit an entire shop, modular display systems are a real benefit for driving sales. The modular nature of the fixtures means that individual pieces can be easily exchanged without leaving unseemly gaps in shelving units and rows of wall displays – while the interior design is both consistent among individual fittings and employs effective branding from the very start.

This is why ARNO’s interior retail design approach always considers the possibility of including interactive components such as touch screen displays or hands-on product try-out elements. Wherever useful, we can also include electronic elements which stimulate not only the visual senses (video displays), but also the sense of hearing (music or audio accompanying the video displays) and touch (rich display surface textures and interactive elements). When combined in an effective manner, the sheer number of senses being engaged by our displays can turn any shopping spree into an experience to remember.

Thanks to the international nature of ARNO Group, we are able to offer our services in providing display system, shop in shop or store interior retail design solutions anywhere in the world. Our core team consists of native speakers of various international languages, allowing effective communication beyond language or cultural boundaries. Contact us with your design briefing documents and we will work hand in hand with you to build the fixtures you need or the store interior you wish for – cost-effectively and always on-time.