By Andrew McQuilkin At its core, wayfinding graphics are meant to help guests easily navigate around stores. It’s critical that there be a graphic hierarchy for key brand messages, departments, classifications, promotions, pricing, and policy. Technology and “branded architecture” also plays an important role. Grocery: Differentiated department signage is king, as the signage stretches from […]

Are you trying to spotlight your corporate brand or the branded and private-label products you carry? Are you a “branded house” or a “house of brands?” Design and architecture play a major role in delivering your brand’s overarching message or minimizing it. What you should do depends on whether you’re trying to make your brand […]

By Andrew McQuilkin Great lighting is the best way to catch shoppers’ attention and sell more product. The best approach is a layered one. Start with functional lighting that ensures shoppers can clearly read labels and employees can perform their jobs. Then add more lighting to spotlight key messaging, displays, and architecture. Grocery: In most […]

Using your products to tell a story is a powerful way to inspire the imagination of customers. Whether customized at the store level or handed down from the corporate office, visual displays inform shoppers about seasonal trends, brand lifestyles, or product benefits—and engender confidence and purpose. Grocery: The best that visual displays get in most […]

By Andrew McQuilkin Everything starts with a store’s product assortment and how the various sizes, shapes, and packaging of products influence the fixtures on which they’re presented. For both department stores and grocery stores, these fixtures have become highly specialized. Grocery: The four basic loose fixture types include cold/frozen cases, produce bins, service cases and […]

By Andrew McQuilkin Each month brings with it another new dominant headline on how one of our most frequent shopping experiences—buying groceries—will be forever changed. Curbside pickup. Driverless cars delivering to our homes. Automatic checkouts. The technological rush shows a willingness by the largest chains to ensure they outmaneuver upstarts and avoid suffering the same […]

Each month brings with it another new dominant headline on how one of our most frequent shopping experiences – buying groceries – will be forever changed. Curbside pickup. Driverless cars delivering to our homes. Automatic checkouts. The technological rush shows a willingness by the largest chains to ensure they outmaneuver online upstarts and avoid suffering […]

If our five senses determine how we perceive the world, brick-and-mortar businesses should plan experiential moments that leverage all the power of our senses to create a brand impression. This is where physical retail has the most significant advantage over online. And since there are millions of combinations, each retailer can deliver a brand promise that is memorable — an impression beyond location, quality, price, selection and service.

Andrew McQuilkin, retail market leader at BHDP, discusses ways his team helps retailers design with shopper’s safety in mind by creating safe stores. During a recent European Department Store conference session on the global purchasing power of Chinese nationals, a fellow audience member—the president of a major department store—whispered to me: “No one’s talking about […]

Eric Kuhn, design leader at BHDP, examines the importance of not only facing, but embracing, change in order to survive in today’s uber-competitive retail climate.   Evolve or die: You could say that in many respects, all of humanity subscribes to this simple statement. And while the influences that inform our evolution are constantly changing, […]