This morning featured an early session called a Retail Town Hall, with six speakers and a moderator.  The speakers were all folks who are in charge of store planning/design/construction for their various companies, which included Macys, Starbucks, and Office Max, among others.  You might think that selling pens or groceries is not that complicated, but listening to the challenges of executing even something simple over and over in hundreds of stores is enough to make my head spin.  And then you’ve got a company like Starbucks, which is opening stores in countries all over the world.  Makes having even a couple of spas seem quite reasonable!

The next session was The Reinvention of Retail Design in a Multi-Channel World, with speakers Scott Jeffrey, CCO, Interbrand Design Forum; Dominick Ponti, Sr. VP Lord &Taylor, and John Puterbaugh, Founder & CEO, Nellymoser, and moderated by Bob Riley, CEO & President of DSA/Phototech.  Jeffrey reported that a universal shopping experience is extinct; consumers today care more about the brand experience, and decide how they want to be sold.  42% of shoppers do online research before coming into the store, and often know more than the sales associates do.  The smartphone is the Mi-osk of the future.  The future of retail is not murky, it’s customer-centric and creative.  Ponti, of Lord & Taylor, advised that design will need to be powerful enough to reach across global touchpoints and flexible enough to be continuously renewed and refreshed.  During the recent remodel of the L&T 5^th Avenue flagship, Ponti incorporated 10 monitors that play video, and companies can upload access to them instantly.  Of course, they pay for that right, so it’s a win-win for everyone, including the customer, who gets fresh, relevant content.  Puterbaugh is a mobile expert, and reiterated what we have heard repeatedly throughout the conference; the smartphone is the vehicle now to reach the customer.  The use of QR codes has greatly increased, and they have a much higher action response rate than traditional ads.  Customers can scan the QR code and see a video, get specific information, or even share links on Facebook and Twitter with their personal networks.  His advice for short-term best practices was to be sure to understand your audience (and their devices), to be consistent and frequent with the presentation, make sure the codes are easy to find and not buried somewhere, and to deliver on expectations by giving specific information, not just linking to some website.

John Wilkins, VP of Retail Strategy for Miller Zell, presented 10 Ways To Screw Up a New Store, with some advice appropriate for salons and spas.  Here is his abbreviated list:

1.       Speak in Tongues to Customers.  Using internal marketing language, acronyms, and jargon.  This is a mistake spas often make – you must be sure the customer knows what you are talking about, especially in your menu!

2.       Introduce Change without Store Associate Involvement.  Spas and salons are guilty of this one too; his recommendation, make sure you get advice from the end-user before redesigning anything, and don’t needlessly discard useful tools, practices and aspects of your business’s culture.

3.       Design with Customers and Associates in Separate Silos.  Similar to the above issue, don’t forget to view the customer experience from all angles and touchponts.

4.       Create a Vision, Then Put it in a Drawer.  Design and branding initiatives and decisions, and the reasoning behind them, must be shared with the whole team.

5.       Speak in Tongues to Your Own Store Associates.  For salons and spas, this means clear directions on everything from service protocols to client scripting.  Not being a business with hundreds of units (Massage Envy excepted) helps!

6.       Design Stuff That’s Cool, But Really Hard to Read.  30million Americans will have cataracts in the next eight years.  Make sure your products and signage can be read.  As someone who now needs to wear reading glasses, I totally get this.  In the shower, if I can’t see what the bottle says, that’s not good.  If you are curious about how marketing materials will look once created, you can check online at The Vision Community.

7.       Believe You Know the Customer Without Walking in Their Shoes. Just try juggling a couple of kids, a job, a spouse, a house, a few pets, and getting to the spa on time.  And then knowing what to do when you get there.  We have lots of information about shopper segments, but a client is not a segment, they’re a person.

8.       Make Roll-out Plans, But Leave “Plan B” to Chance.  This one applies more to big retailers, but the point is clear, always have a back-up plan.  Because we know the unexpected is what will happen.

9.       Consolidate Everything at the Store.  For new stores, Wilkins recommended offsite staging areas to receive deliveries, for smoother openings.

10.   Treat Digital Media as an Afterthought – it’s here to stay, so we need to incorporate it into design and operations.

I attended a session called The Best of Euroshop; this is an every-three years event in Dusseldorf, Germany, for store designers.  4 design wonks shared their photos and impressions of this event, which just occurred, and advised on what they thought we would see coming stateside.  The verdict, along with a lot of creative and cool design ideas, was that LED lighting is the future.

Mark Hunter gave a session entitled  Full-Price/Full-Profit: Yes, It’s Still Possible! The premise was that you should not focus on market share, or allow price to define your quality.  Keeping prices where they belong enables you to run a more profitable business and deliver quality for your clients.  And, of course, keep your staff employed.  No secret to those of us in the spa industry.

The last session of the day was Five Ideas; Small Changes Leading to Big Impact, by Bruce Barteldt, and James Farnell of Little Online.  They said they started this simple approach to store design and operations as a reaction to the recession, but then wondered why they had not always done it this way, and now they do.  The five ideas are:

• Humanize – connecting emotionally to clients.  Addressing human needs to feel connected to the world around them, and enriching the shopping experience with meaning.
• Personalize – products and services with a personal touch.  Easy for salons and spas!
• Localize – make shopping relevant to the local market.
• Minimize – simplify the buying decisions.  This one really resonates for spas; clients look to us for edited assortments, they have plenty of information overload.  Don’t carry too many products, and simplify service menus.
• Digitize – Make sure you are participating in social media and not letting the growth curve pass you by.  Execute quickly on small ideas, the world is moving too fast to wait for the giant idea to come to fruition.

All in all, another great conference, with lots of ideas to be put into practice in salons and spas.  Hope you picked up a few nuggets through the blog.  Let me know your thoughts!