Turning a blank box into a store
How to plan furnishings for a retail shop before (and after) you open, including examples of how I failed at it repeatedly
I love looking into vacant storefront windows. I started doing it after I moved to Chicago and saw the movie High Fidelity and decided that, rather than use my journalism degree for something, I’d like to own a shop where I could stand around and chit chat with my co-workers all day about nothing.
So I started taking vacant storefronts very seriously, peering inside, and using my imagination. I liked the rugged ones, the dirty white boxes that looked like an art gallery fled it in the middle of the night, especially if the building looked like it had been there since the turn of the century.
I also have this habit of pinning beautiful storefronts and imaginative, yet minimal, retail displays on Pinterest. So when I signed the lease on my first retail space in 2019, I had already been training my whole life for furnishing it. I knew I was capable of building out the kind of shop interior that would probably, within six months, be featured in Dwell.
But somewhere between the Pinterest boards and the pallets of product amassing in my garage, things went a little off the rails. I wouldn’t say the design of the first Fernseed location was a disaster—it looked nice enough that people remarked how cute it was when they walked in—but we had this pile of product that floated around the store like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for about a month before anyone could figure out how anything in it could be displayed. I had also purchased products I intended to launch with that never found a home, because they were confusing and hard to display. Probably my biggest mistake was purchasing a bunch of tables and racks and shelves that looked cute on the internet, but without a real plan of what would go on them. Of the original furniture and display pieces I purchased for the shop before we opened, only one still remains at the store three years later: the cash wrap. And we probably would have scrapped that, too, were it not custom-built, nine feet long, and anchored to the floor.
Looking back I don’t know how I would have avoided these mistakes. I don’t actually know how a person should go about pairing initial products with their retail display fixtures. I honestly thought if I had enough surface space, the products would just go on those surfaces and it would all magically make sense. But furnishing a retail shop isn’t just about putting products on top of things. There’s an art and science to it. It’s a little like the difference between making a beautiful plate of food for someone to eat, and food styling for photography. You can’t just slap things on a surface and think they’ll look good enough to sell. You have to add a little magic to it.
The good thing is I adapt quickly when money is at stake. I tweak, I remodel, I fix a few things at a time. So while I can’t impart to you a step-by-step process for how to furnish a retail shop before opening, I can tell you what I’ve learned in the process of adaptively furnishing two stores over three years.
A couple of things worth noting before I launch into this list. First, I’m not an AutoCAD person. Maybe if I used AutoCAD like it was an extension of my own hand I could have avoided the hard process of learning by doing, but I couldn’t build a tiny virtual model of the store before moving in. Maybe you can! That would probably be helpful. But these tips might still be useful even if you can create a tiny digital dollhouse and merchandise all your phantom products in it first.
Second, my entire life is complicated by the fact that we sell live plants. If I were to go back and do it all over again I would open a store called Nøm and we would just sell polymer clay earrings and wood bracelets and wool wall hangings. Maybe we would have one tall Dracaena marginata in the corner just for ambiance, but we wouldn’t have to care for hundreds of plants in plastic grow pots with dirt spilling out the bottom. I tell people that maintaining a tidy plant shop is like trying to merchandise lettuce inside a Nordstrom Rack. It’s a dirty juxtaposition, and I don’t recommend it to anyone. Don’t open a plant shop! Sell polymer earrings.
Some other advice:
Visit other stores. Start looking at fixtures. Never stop looking at them. From now on, you are always learning.
Before you open, get off the internet and get inside some shops, lots of shops. Don’t go in like a shopper. Go in, and pay attention to the furnishings. This is harder than it looks. Snapping out of your shopping brain and paying attention to how the products are displayed is like trying to hold your gaze in one of those Magic Eye pictures. Your brain wants to keep shopping, but you need to train it to look at what’s underneath all those products. You’ll start to notice it’s all pretty simple stuff: tables, upside-down crates, serving trays. Pay the most attention to how other retailers achieve levels. What specific objects are they using to display things at different heights? Take photos, take notes. Figure out what you like and don’t like about how other retailers are doing things.
The building blocks of our South Tacoma location: pallets, paving bricks, wood planks, and cinder blocks. Start small, and start with building blocks.
I recommend setting up your shop for the first time like you’re building it with LEGOs. Everything should be modular, interchangeable, universal. (It doesn’t have to be interlocking.) This way you can move things around into different configurations as you start to understand how people flow through the space. The pieces you use can be whatever is cheap and available and matches your desired aesthetic. At our South Tacoma Way shop, I used cinder blocks, pallets, pine planks, and brick paving stones. I never want to lift another cinder block in my life, but at $1.50 each, topped with a pallet that came (free!) with a delivery, we were able to achieve a fairly inexpensive, modular shop design that changed many times before we’re now, after nearly 18 months at this location, investing in custom furnishings based on our learnings.
Use all available wall space for shelves.
There’s a graveyard in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood that spans 119 acres and is about a three-minute walk from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play baseball. For as long as I lived in Chicago I heard whisperings about how developers wanted to relocate that cemetery because the real estate it was sitting on was just so valuable. Never mind that it’s the final resting place of Chicago nobility like Marshall Field (the Marshall Field) and renowned architect Daniel Burnham, and never mind that we know what happens when you relocate cemeteries for real estate development. Do you know how much money that land could generate as condos? Unused retail wall space is like Graceland Cemetery. It’s incredibly valuable real estate that generates absolutely no revenue and causes everyone a great deal of anxiety no matter how beautiful it is. Don’t hang signs on walls, or leave them empty. Instead, put shelves on walls, and stack the shelves with products. We can use the same square footage to sell six $30 plant pots as we can to display large wool wall hangings handmade in Poland that will never sell because they’re $300 each and you can get cheaper versions at World Market. Your goal for every square foot of your shop is to use it to turn small parcels of product that repeatedly sell. You’re erecting condos, not landscaping a graveyard. (By the way, did you know there are averages for sales per square foot in the retail industry? You can find out what yours is by measuring your annual revenue and dividing it by your retail square footage, or dividing your monthly revenue by your square footage and multiplying it by 12. In 2021, our sales per square foot were $302.07, which is about average.)Pay attention to your windows, and how the sun moves through your shop throughout the day.
Yes, I own a plant shop, so sun is important. That’s not why I’m mentioning it. Sun. Damages. Product. It fades book covers. It stains clothing. Sun also back lights displays so customers looking toward a window at certain times of day can’t actually see anything in front of them. Knowing how the sun affects your product is one reason to set up modular displays at the beginning, so you can make changes to fixtures housing product that requires better UV protection or different light setups. This is real!Do not build anything custom at the beginning unless you are building it yourself for $200 or less.
Some designs look really cool on Pinterest, but after just three years in retail I could pick them apart at a glance and tell you why they will not play nice with shoppers. Some custom builds don’t work because they take up too much space to sell too few products, or, failure of all failings, they look so nice people are afraid to shop off of them. You do not want to sink $1,600 into an inaccessible trip hazard you’ll want to tear down three months in. If you’ve signed a retail lease, you likely have 3-5 years to figure out what works best for your layout, so wait to hire a carpenter until you’ve made some concrete observations.
This nook is so Instagram-worthy, but the entrance is a trip hazard that won’t fit wheelchairs or strollers. And shoppers will not squeeze into tight spaces, especially post-COVID. If you invest in anything, invest in directional lighting.
I recommend track fixtures with lights you can aim in any direction as the layout of your shop changes. We opened Proctor with hanging lamps and recently replaced them with directional track lighting. Such a difference!Edit, edit, edit.
What’s that thing Coco Chanel said about removing one accessory before leaving the house? If you cannot figure out where a particular product fits, leave it out for now. A crammed display, or random item shoehorned into a grouping where it doesn’t belong, will cost you more money in lost sales than simply leaving that product in back stock for now. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” is my ultimate goal for our updated shop designs, and it’s still a struggle. I’m constantly walking around the shop moving things around so it doesn’t look like a garage sale.The best retail displays tell a story.
Retail is story telling. I love saying this, it’s so TED Talk-ish. I think someone in every industry is saying this about their industry. Software is story telling! Real estate is story telling! Heating and cooling is story telling! But in retail it really is true. Displays don’t contain stories that have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they tell shoppers the story of the kind of people they will be if they buy something from that display. We recently reset our shop displays from Valentine’s Day to whatever-it-is-right-after-Valentine’s-Day, which is anything that’s not red and pink. What was that, exactly? “What if we did like a blue and green snakes thing?” is what I wrote in a Slack message to the person currently in charge of story telling at our Proctor location. An hour later she sent back pictures of a blue and green color story, with snake motif planters and snake plants. She made it look amazing, and it worked because it also incorporated something at every price point. The story isn’t that a snake went for a walk in a plant shop. It’s just that blue and green and snakes are really cool, and you can own a piece of this blue and green snake trend for $30 if you’re budget-conscious, or for $300 if you’re as committed to it as we apparently are at 9:15 in the morning on February 15. Design your space so that you can tell those stories, even if they’re incredibly simple, like blue and green and snakes.
Use sales data to make display changes.
My dad told me this story once about a turnaround CEO who saved a hardware store chain from bankruptcy by changing one thing about the store layout: candy bars at the cash register. (I hear the groaning, those at the back who have heard me talk about this four thousand times.) You see, this was before this kind of thing was commonplace. You didn’t used to have to walk through an impulse-purchase gauntlet before checking out at Office Depot, and there wasn’t a Pepsi fridge at the Lowe’s point of purchase. People were at the hardware store to buy finishing nails and saw blades, not Snickers bars, but this CEO saw it differently. Someone’s on a job site, taking an unplanned break to buy something they forgot they needed, and you know what? They’re hungry. So throw a bag of Combos at eye level while they’re waiting to pay for a 30-pack of contractor bags and here comes $125k in extra revenue per location per year. At 3,600 locations, that’s about $4.5 million in annual candy-bar-at-the-cash-register sales. I’m totally making up these numbers, but they’re reasonable. I cannot recall when my dad told me this story, he doesn’t remember it, and I can’t find any solid evidence that it’s actually true. But it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not for me anymore, because I’ve used this story over and over again in attempting to understand what products are our candy bars at the cash register. And it works! You know what teeny tiny product generates the second highest revenue of any single plant in our shop? Air plants. We sell them for $6 and we make close to $10k in annual revenue alone on that one product. We also sell about 1,500 bags of our own potting mix blend each year, at $5 each. But it isn’t just about those impulse add-on purchases. It’s also understanding what your flagship products are. Can you guess, for example, what single product generates the most revenue for The Gap? It’s men’s hoodies. What is our hoodie? It’s a straight-lined terra cotta cylinder pot that comes in raw and glazed options. Last year we sold almost $40k of them. So you can bet that I’ve spent some time figuring out how to merchandise the products that are keeping us in business. Everything else is just decoration. You have to design your entire shop around your best sellers, but when you’re just starting out, you don’t know yet what they are. You need time to collect that data, and the tools to analyze it. Once you have that, you can make a merchandising plan that emphasizes what you need to sell 5 of each day to remain a going concern.
We’re now in the process of building custom furnishings for our second location. (We remodeled our Proctor shop late last year.) I’m incorporating all of these learnings into a layout with fixtures that support our best sellers, is mindful of sun exposure, cribs from some of the best retail display ideas I’ve observed over the past few years, and leaves us lots of space for storytelling.
Once that project is complete, I’m sure I’ll still make changes. Always learning, always adapting. And after all these years, still peering into vacant storefront windows.