Despite some of the challenges that Sony has faced over the last several years, the iconic Sony brand is still one of the best known brands in the world of consumer electronics. Leveraging the Sony brand and the “Make.Believe” tagline is always a key objective when designing retail store displays for the company. Sony’s broad range of consumer electronics products requires an equally broad range of point-of-purchase displays and retail store fixtures. In today’s blog, we will review a few of the retail merchandisers that we designed for Sony.
We designed the end cap retail store display fixture below for Sony’s laptops and accessories such as laptop cases. The entire fixture was constructed using sintra which we digitally printed, cut on our CNC machine, and then heat bent. We created dividers for the product set below the main shelf area and added clear plastic channels for product information cards. The end cap utilized sintra support ribs rather than metal support bars, which provided ample weight-bearing capacity.
A second example of a Sony-branded fixture we designed is the slatwall end cap shown below. Designed for camera accessories, this end cap was nothing to write home about from a design standpoint, but it was highly functional, simple, and well branded with side and header signs. It was also a relatively high capacity unit which provided a lot of versatility for hanging products.
Sony asked RICH LTD. to design a number of variations of a counter display for its camera accessories. The displays needed to fit a mix of cameras, lenses, and other accessories. We designed the merchandising concepts around a vacuum formed plastic base tray with location-specific product pockets and printed graphics. These product trays were designed to be placed on shelves in locking glass cabinets or fitted with a clear acrylic topper when placed on an open countertop.
In addition to product specific merchandisers, we had an opportunity to design a 23 ft. wall section of a high-traffic electronics store. The design below shows a clean 15 ft. countertop section with storage cabinets below and a 3-D branded header above. The 8 ft. section to the right utilizes a curved backdrop with a Sony header, a mounted flat screen TV, a curved counter area with storage cabinets, and a stand-alone 4-sided glorifier island.
Finally, we created an island merchandiser with 2 long display surfaces and storage compartments below. The ends of the island had matching end caps. All 4 sides of this large retail store fixture had angled graphics below the flat display area and visually empowering header graphics on the upper part of the back panels.
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.