What is the name of the industry / sector that designs retail store layouts etc. in order to encourage impulse buying and maximise profits?
March 26, 2011 9:14 AM   Subscribe

What is the name of the industry / sector that designs retail store layouts etc. in order to encourage impulse buying and maximise profits?
posted by FuckingAwesome to Shopping (9 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Visual merchandising
posted by prenominal at 9:16 AM on March 26, 2011


Visual merchandising
posted by Hazy Star at 9:16 AM on March 26, 2011


Could also be considered a specialization of Operations Management.
posted by dobie at 9:45 AM on March 26, 2011


It can be store design, category management as well as visual merchandising.
posted by MuffinMan at 9:55 AM on March 26, 2011


And it's not really an "industry," in my experience in retail - store chains have in-house visual merchandisers. Cracker Barrel has a special fake store they set up everything in for a new store, they take a ton of pictures and mark down where they put everything in, and then they ship it to the location. At Disneyland, the stock crew (that was me) came in at 6am on a Saturday, but the visual merchandising staff was there at 4am, and used us for a few hours for the grunt work, once the shelves and such were up where they wanted them.

(The folks who did this job had years of experience in retail, and the one who I actually talked to had a degree in retail management, and was an internal promotion from within the Store Operations crew, not a generic manager who'd spent time running It's a Small World or whatever.)
posted by SMPA at 10:09 AM on March 26, 2011




Industrial design and service design are also fields that deal with this sort of thing.
posted by DeusExMegana at 1:12 PM on March 26, 2011


Retail merchandising, visual merchandising. And they are usually teams/departments within a retailer's own company, not an external industry that serves retailers.
posted by Kololo at 1:22 PM on March 26, 2011


I just came in to recommend Paco Underhill. He's pretty much the father of this industry.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 2:16 PM on March 26, 2011


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