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Visual Reigns

Guess who really understands the challenge of bringing online retail to brick-and-mortar

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You may have heard that social media has turned retailing on its head.

There are too many reasons not to go to the store, except there must still be a valid reason for stores. Why else would all those online e-tailers be opening them?

They often start with temporary pop-up installations and discover, “Wow! Those work!” Shoppers seem to like them – who knew?

But someone has to develop the principles of good store design. And it can be trickier than putting a website together: signage, lighting, sightlines, merchandise display, inventory management, service, staffing.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Gala Magriñá, founder and creative director of M Crown Productions, a Long Island City, N.Y., design and consulting firm. M Crown had worked with The Tie Bar, an online retailer, converting its pop-up in Chicago into a permanent store. (You’ll read about it in VMSD’s May issue.)

M Crown introduced The Tie Bar to all those store design principles the pop-up had been sorely lacking. Nothing new about that, but here’s what is new:

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Magriñá and her firm came out of the world of visual merchandising. Not inheritors of the Alton Doody/RPA tradition. Rather, their forebears were people like Andy Markopoulos, Gene Moore, Candy Pratts Price, Simon Doonan. People who worked with emotion and excitement, who understood the neuron path from eye to brain to credit card.

For too long, that tradition was relegated to dusty upstairs closets, brought out – in a flourish of sparkles and bows – only at Christmastime, or for a special perfume launch.

Budgets? Business objectives? Don’t worry their pretty little heads.

But visual merchandisers always understood the power of a brand. Or, rather, the power of the emotion of a brand. In the cluttered world of the Internet, e-tailers have to capture attention first with a readily identifiable object. A visual icon – a logo. And when they venture into the 3-D world of retailing, they have to transfer and translate all that the logo represents.

Magriñá and her firm started out in the world of events, creating those special at-a-glance visual attractions on busy tradeshow floors. That’s also where the pop-up phenomenon has its roots, a larger and more serviceable version of a tradeshow booth.

But she also honed her instincts for the more substantial requirements of brick-and-mortar. Tie Bar’s fixture program is a model of smart merchandise display, flexibility and storage.

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The best part of it, I think (and you can read all the details in the magazine), is the recognition that visual merchandising can not only understand the strategic import of a store design, but is, in fact, pretty good at it.

In fact, in today’s world of millennial instant gratification and short attention spans, visual merchandising has become the master of store design strategy.

My friend Andy would be proud.

As a journalist, writer, editor and commentator, Steve Kaufman has been watching the store design industry for 20 years. He has seen the business cycle through retailtainment, minimalism, category killers, big boxes, pop-ups, custom stores, global roll-outs, international sourcing, interactive kiosks, the emergence of China, the various definitions of “branding” and Amazon.com. He has reported on the rise of brand concept shops, the demise of brand concept shops and the resurgence of brand concept shops. He has been an eyewitness to the reality that nothing stays the same, except the retailer-shopper relationship.

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