Shoppers who file purposefully down store aisles may think they’re on a personal mission: bread, juice, tissues, bananas. In fact, retailers design their spaces to remind patrons that while they only need one thing, it wouldn’t hurt to grab a few extras along the way.
So, visual merchandisers and store designers lay out grocery stores with essentials like produce and dairy along the perimeter; convenience stores line checkout lines with candy and gum; and clothing stores use mannequins to display the latest trends.
The problem is, after a store is laid out – particularly stores with multiple brands available – it can be hard to monitor product presentation. The bright pyramid of oranges that was so enticing last week all too quickly becomes a haphazard pile.
After more than two decades in the packaged goods industry, Phil Storage wanted a better way to help manufacturers, brokers and sales teams, and retailers monitor visual merchandising plans.
“Historically, they wouldn’t be able to visually see anything,” he explains. “Brokers would go into stores … and they would get no visual verification that anything had actually been in compliance [after they left]. They would wait four weeks, and they’d get a report from Nielsen.”
Storage’s company,
StoreFlix, addresses this problem with a cloud-based, mobile-friendly app that works as well for retailers and designers as it does for brands themselves. Basically, brokers who visit stores or retailers themselves snap photos or videos of product displays on a smart phone or tablet, upload the photos and share them on team-based walls. Tagging allows photos to be sorted and categorized.
“They love being able to share successes, big ideas and best practices with their teams in a millisecond,” Storage says. “Historically they wouldn’t be able to share any successes at all until they had a sales meeting a month later.”
In some cases, retail chains use StoreFlix to ensure compliance with company-wide visual display plans. In other cases, manufacturers check the app to make sure their products are on shelves.
“Whenever you have folks capturing information for a manufacturer, they’re sharing it amongst themselves, but they’re also sharing it with retailers,” Storage says. “We’ve solved a huge problem in this business, which is visual verification for compliance issues and monitoring.”
By Robin Donovan
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