You’ve heard it said before that details matter. When it comes to point of purchase design, it’s really all about the details, particularly if you are trying to creative an effective retail display. There are so many important aspects of point-of-purchase design: structure, colors, materials, accents, graphics, economics, messaging, shipping, durability, and so much more. Paying attention to the details means the difference between creating an average display and a distinctive display that will grab shopper attention and sell product. Let’s take a look at recent hat display we created for Melin to illustrate the importance of details in the design process.
Let’s first introduce you to our customer. Meet Melin, a Southern California premium lifestyle brand that was established to create a new category of luxury headwear. Melin products symbolize dedication, innovation, and achievement. The company pays extraordinary attention to detail and utilizes high-end Italian leathers and other materials in its headwear products.
These hats are unbelievably nice. Many of their styles sell for upwards of $250. As an example, check out “The Pursuit” ($250) shown below.
Melin has done a great job of creating an exclusive and luxury vibe by a getting celebrities and athletes to wear their hats. See NFL linebacker Zac Diles wearing “The Affair” below.
Given its premium product and celebrity status in the world of luxury headwear, you can see why we were excited to work with Melin on a glorifier display. Melin came to us after they had secured an opportunity to get their hats into Lids stores. Our challenge in designing an effective POP display was fairly difficult. If you’ve ever been in a Lids store, you can probably guess why. Lids merchandising approach is generally to create a wall of hats, which is very space efficient, but it makes it more difficult to find ways to stand out, particularly if you are a high-end brand with a much higher price point than other hats in the store.
The display we were to create needed to hang on the wall with all the other hats and somehow make Melin hats stand out. This is where the design details came in. We needed to create a display that communicated the same attention to detail that Melin builds into its hats. We designed the hanging glorifier shown below.
The hanging glorifier box helped the Melin hats stand out in the sea of other headwear products. We built the display out of MDF and used a textured dark wood laminate finish which helped to communicate the luxury message. We used bright white melamine on the inside to help make the hats pop against the background. The front trim was glossy black acrylic which also reinforced the luxury nature of the brand. We built in a removable shelf and a removable back graphic panel which offered messaging to communicate the Melin story. The inside of the glorifier neatly fit 2 hats and the leather box that comes with the hats.
Another example of important accent details is the laser-cut black acrylic dimensional logos that we added to each side of the glorifier as shown below.
The glorifier was primarily designed to hang on slatwall, but it could also be used as a counter display. The photo below shows how Lids worked the display into their planogram in their stores.
This project reinforced for us what we already knew: When it comes to point of purchase design, details matter.
Jim Hollen is the owner and President of RICH LTD. (www.richltd.com), a 35+ year-old California-based point-of-purchase display, retail store fixture, and merchandising solutions firm which has been named among the Top 50 U.S. POP display companies for 9 consecutive years. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. and graduate of Stanford Business School, Jim Hollen has served more than 3000 brands and retailers over more than 20 years and has authored nearly 500 blogs and e-Books on a wide range of topics related to POP displays, store fixtures, and retail merchandising.
Jim has been to China more than 50 times and has worked directly with more than 30 factories in Asia across a broad range of material categories, including metal, wood, acrylic, injection molded and vacuum formed plastic, corrugated, glass, LED lighting, digital media player, and more. Jim Hollen also oversees RICH LTD.’s domestic manufacturing operation and has experience manufacturing, sourcing, and importing from numerous Asian countries as well as Vietnam and Mexico.
His experience working with brands and retailers spans more than 25 industries such as food and beverage, apparel, consumer electronics, cosmetics/beauty, sporting goods, automotive, pet, gifts and souvenirs, toys, wine and spirits, home improvement, jewelry, eyewear, footwear, consumer products, mass market retail, specialty retail, convenience stores, and numerous other product/retailer categories.