Minimal POP yields clean look

Store Equipment & Design, Jan, 2000 by Marilyn D. Cavicchia

Shoppers Drug Mart clears away clutter, paves way for easy shopping

It's a classic retail paradox that a store designed to be easy to get into and out of quickly often encourages longer stays and bigger purchases. That idea was at the heart of recent renovation work by Design Vision, Toronto, for Shoppers Drug Mart, a leading Canadian drugstore chain whose parent company, Imasco, was purchased last quarter by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. The store pictured above--in an affluent area of Toronto--is one of 24 stores across Canada in which Design Vision's concept will be tested to varying degrees.

OPEN COSMETICS

The overall look of the store is clean, open and uncluttered--a combination that's especially striking in the cosmetics area. Under a gracefully curving ceiling treatment washed by diffuse fluorescents, beauty products are presented on stylish, upscale-looking fixtures arranged in an "open sell" configuration, meaning customers are free to wander and interact with the cosmeticians, without the barrier of an imposing counter between them. Modeled after innovative beauty retailer Sephora, this radically different layout has attracted vendors that usually avoid mass retail settings, including Chanel, Clarins and Clinique, according to Design Vision president George Hughes.

A studied avoidance of "POP overload" is critical to the uncluttered look of the cosmetics area and the rest of the store, Hughes said. While there are some spaces devoted to manufacturers' displays--like the backlit signs on the ends of the cosmetics fixtures--POP was kept to a bare minimum. Few shoppers retain the information they're confronted with on hanging signs, cardboard floor displays and the like, Hughes said, so why place these obstacles in their way?

Also avoided was the practice of stacking back stock on top of fixtures, which makes a lot of drug and other mass retail stores look like "a canyon, with merchandise climbing up and up," said Magnus Clarke, Design Vision's director of design. To make the different areas of the store easy to see and navigate, fixtures were kept to a maximum height of six feet, and were designed to "prevent that over-zealous store manager" from stacking merchandise and POP higher and higher, "re-cluttering" the store, Clarke said. The tops of gondolas, counters and other display fixtures are "economical in their use of space," so there's no room for clutter, he added.

CLEAR COLOR CODING

In this environment, shoppers can easily see the color coding that differentiates areas of the store: greenish-aqua for the beauty section, vibrant blue for pharmacy and white for the "convenience" area. The colors appear on the floor, on signs and on each area's display fixtures. The cosmetics area's color-coded signs work particularly well, Hughes said: The signs read "Images," which means the same thing in English and French--perfect for bilingual populations.

Lighting, too, was carefully planned to help shoppers find their way. The store had to be bright enough for customers--especially senior citizens--to find products and read labels, but without the glare that can add stress and curtail a shopping trip. Design Vision consumer-tested a few fixtures in a computer simulation and arrived at a combination of HID halogen accent fixtures and fluorescent ambient light that varies in brightness according to the area of the store. Glare is avoided by bouncing the light off the ceiling, creating a "halo effect," Clarke said, or by filtering it through acrylic panels, the technique used to backlight the cosmetics area signage.

The result of all this careful planning, Clarke said, is a store that's "much cleaner, much easier to shop and much more pleasurable." And, Hughes added, one that encourages shoppers to "stop, take a look and make another purchase."

Simulation gives design another dimension

Central to the design process for the newly remodeled Shoppers Drug Mart stores was the highly realistic 3-D simulation developed by Design Vision, which offers virtual software products as well as design services.

The 1 1/2-year consumer research phase was much more productive, design director Magnus Clarke said, because offering the test subjects a 3-D simulation instead of 2-D drawing means "you don't have to ask them to stretch their imagination to far."

Also, said Design Vision president George Hughes, it was easy to test a variety of different store features--like types of light fixtures--by plugging them into the simulation and seeing how test subjects reacted.

The simulation made visualization easier not just for the test subjects, but for the client as well; it was easier for Shoppers Drug Mart board members to make suggestions, too. While he has "war wounds" from some of the board meetings, Hughes joked, it was far better that board members see the 3-D store from the beginning, rather than interpreting from 2-D drawings and then being surprised when they toured the actual store.

Using an easily manipulated 3-D simulation enabled everyone to think more creatively during the design process, according to Clarke. "It was more like working from a blank slate," he said, "challenging what the store is about."