Spotlight on Store Fixtures and Lighting

Then, they automatically turn to the right where a large table and mannequin is set up featuring the newest items in the store. This display will also include a variety of jewelry, as well as some flowers from the greenhouse display. Because each section gradually ends and begins, the customers’ eye to pulled from one display to the next.

She endorses learning from employees when it comes to displays.

“Allow other people in your store to mentor setting up the displays no matter how old they are,” said Barker. “See what lights the 16 or 80 year old you’re working with up.” She suggested taking your most creative employee to market with you. When you’re at the market, they’re already working on your display, she expressed.

Robyn Kuntzmann , brand manager of the Branches Gift Shop division of Morrison Healthcare, explained hospital gift shops are unique in their customer base. She oversees 20 hospital gift shops in nine different states. At these locations, 80 per cent of their sales are to staff of the hospital, including doctors, nurses and food service staff.

Because they have this captive audience, it’s very important that the displays are rotated at least weekly, expressed Kuntzmann.

The staff – who sometimes come in two or three times a day – are looking to get respite from the floors in the gift shop, so they come in seeking snacks, candy and drinks located in the back of the store. This means you must have something up front to capture their at- tention or they will have blinders on when they walk through the store, Kuntzmann said.

They favor display tables of two or three different heights paired with staggered merchandisers.

“We want the merchandisers to go away; it’s the product that need to be forefront,” Kuntzmann remarked.

The traffic moves straight into the store in almost all cases in their 300 or 400 to 1,000-square-foot stores. The cash wrap is in the back of the store with a full view of the door.

“People will go straight through the door and that’s why it’s important that that line of sight is through that path,” Kuntzmann said.

Displays that pop will entice passersby to come into your store, said Gail Cook , manager at two Mayo Clinic Rochester hospital gift shops: the 1,300-square-foot Sisters Crossing Gift Shop at Saint Mary’s Campus and the 1,193-square-foot Methodist Campus Gift Shop.

“In a hospital gift shop, you only have seconds to capture people’s attention as

Continued on page 162