What Is A Slatwall – Your Introduction To Shop Fitting Your Store

Stores are set up with a lot of hard work and planning. One has to identify a great location, source the right goods, do some good promotions and then wait for the customers to start walking in. Your location, goods, and promotion will guarantee a good footfall for sure. What happens after the customer has walked in and started browsing. They will saunter around and either like what they see or maybe decide to move on.

Though there can be many reasons for their departure, one of the reasons that retail sales psychologists are talking about, is the ambiance and experience of the store. A customer may not find the store immersive or not interesting. It all depends on how you do the shopfitting.

Business Sense

How can a store owner make the store more immersive and engaging for the customer? From the viewpoint of store ambiance, the important thing is to display your goods in a fashion where there is a flow that leads the customer from one shelf to another. Though the store premises may be a square or a rectangle, the way a layout is created can create an intuitive walk through the store.

The store display of the goods can be placed on a wide selection of display units. There are many options to choose from but the most popular and effective are the Slatwall Panels and Slatwall Shelving.

Solution For Display

The best Slatwall Panels are made of MDF material and have horizontal grooves at regular intervals. The grooves are used to create Slatwall shelves with brackets. The Slatwall is available in a variety of finishes like paper pressed, melamine, laminated on one side, or both in many choices of colours. There are many options, either you can fit them against the wall or have a standalone unit called Gondolas.

Slatwall comes in many varieties and names. They are referred to as slat panels, or others call slot walls, and also slot panels. They have horizontal grooves at regular intervals. The common size of slat walls is about 8 feet in width x 4 feet in height. This is the landscape/horizontal orientation of slat walls.

For portrait/vertical Slatwall the size is 4 feet width x 8 feet height. The spacing between the grooves is less than 4 inches. However, the panels can be made to size as per business requirements.

Smart Display

A good Slatwall store will have the entire range on display starting with Slatwall Panels, Slatwall Shelves, and an infinite range of Slatwall accessories. What compliments the slatwalls are hooks, Slatwall shelves made of acrylic or glass, Slatwall baskets made of metal wire. A good combination of these things allows you to display a wide range of your goods and merchandise in your retail shop. Slatwall is easy to mount.

For an inventive mind, the walls and gondolas are objects for creating the environment for the store. How you place them will nudge the customers to move in that direction. Gondolas are also known as H–units have panels on all four sides.  A customer can walk around it selecting the product from the display or the unit can spin on its axis if the merchandise on display is not heavy.

If you place the Slatwall shelves at the right height, it will come straight in the focus of a customer in a way that it cannot be missed. This is a smart use of the Slatwall panels. The Slatwall is versatile and should be handled like creative building blocks. You can map out the areas and create an organic path through the store which the customer follows. This is the way to control the experience and influence the decision-making of the customer.

Easy To Customise

A lot depends on the merchandise that you are selling, if you are a fashion store you will have clothes and accessories for all ages and genders. This is when you will require to create sections and separate the stuff. The accessories might be placed according to gender sections. Mixing up the Slatwall panels with Gondolas and Spinning Gondolas which are standalones.

Besides merchandisers and retail stores, there are other groups that recognise the power of Slatwall. Slatwall can also be found in residential garages, flower shops, schools, and any place seeking smart storage or display systems. There are case studies of Slatwalls being used by Gyms, Ceramic tile stores, Art galleries, and stationery stores. They all have used the standard Slatwall Panels in a way that blends in with their store. Some have got customised Slatwall Panels in specific colour while others have chosen different textures.

There are Slatwall shop fitting stores that can do custom solutions for your retail outlet or when you need bulk purchase. The real experts will give the best advice to structure the shop floor of your store. One such Slatwall Store made custom hooks for a stationery client because they wanted to save space. The customised hooks were designed, fabricated, and delivered in 4 weeks. This made the store owner mighty pleased.

Another store was going to have an exhibition and wanted the Slatwall Panel colour to complement the product’s colour. The solution found by the design team of the fitting store was to powder coat the aluminium panels with the chosen colour and deliver it within 5 weeks just in time for the exhibition.

Business Intelligence

Any retailer has to be aware that he would have to redress his store according to seasons and festivities. Redesigning and refitting the store should never be the only option. The cost of the transformation would be unacceptable to the business plan. This is when the malleability of the Slatwall panels and Slatwall shelving comes to hand. These panels and gondolas can be rearranged according to the new scheme of things. The store could have a completely new layout that would fit into the scheme of things for that period or season.

Some business owners are tuned into understanding customer behaviour by collating data from their stores. They use CCTV footage to understand patterns of customer movement. These patterns are studied to see which of them converted to a sale. This data is mapped against the order of display and intelligence is gathered based on this.

They get to understand what is working and how they should tweak the other parts of the store to enhance the opportunity of making a sale. At such times having slatwalls gives them a big advantage as it is easy to shuffle the gondolas, shelves, and panels to the spots that have been detected by the data mining.

When ordering for Slatwall one should have the foresight of the possibilities that are available to the store. Having the right number of panels and a good mix of other fixtures like shelves, frame hooks, straight faceouts, waterfall faceouts, peghook, and handrails is the trick of creating multiple permutations and combinations.

There could be many other choices and options available for retail displays, but Slatwall remains the solid spine of most store displays. Innovative fixtures are made for some specific needs but they cannot compete with Slatwall in terms of variety, versatility, durability, economy, and ease of use. A good Slatwall store can be a great help in helping you design your storage space and also customise the fixtures according to your specific need.