WaterHenge: The Tester Merchandiser

In order to serve this customer with their new merchandising project I like to examine some of the relevant projects that I was involved in the past namely Circle of Beauty for Sears, No7 for Boots & ULTA Smart wall and Color Library ...

1st Ulta in Texas

this No7 unit illustrates how prominent are the products are both in the back & in front

Bergdorf Goodman?

Bergdorf Goodman

Real Glass hand bag aria

Notice hand bag aria

Although the mentioned goes back almost twenty year, but their solutions to merchandising remains as current as ever, they all set out and to cater to female consumer in a prestigious mass market way with a single goal of selling beauty products as efficient as possible,
as a result of testing , high gene arias , mirrors ...
But the counters are borrowed from heavily staffed so-called prestige market which probably routs back to 19th century boutiques of Paris and the early 20th century's Bergdorf Goodman, and yet even Bergdorf Goodman and its like are trying to get to the basics when it comes to women clientele, by simply ignoring all others "men" in favor of laddies and this is not limited to high end stores just try to buy an Outdoors Man or a Motor Trend Magazine from any supermarket counter anywhere in America...
More and more of supermarket checkout counters are lowered to 30 inches or below ....
...And this is time to go back almost twenty years to Nottingham UK namely their cosmetics counter where I was tasked to create a look and an environment for merchandizing through testing to house Boots's No7 line and their other vendors such as Yardley, Max Factor and others...Not very different from task at hand.

He rarely shops the cosmetics counter

The first thing I noticed was the low 30 inches tall and 30 inches deep counter tops a very awkward height for a 6 feet tall man such as my self, after all I am the 50th percentile male all cars are sized to my height every door is formed to fit my stature and as an armature car designer and a former architectural model maker I was trained to create things that is acceptable to the 50th percentile woman at 5 foot 3 inches but to favor the 6 foot tall man after all most of these architectural books like

Susan Lucci fits in this car so does Hulk

Notice, low counter raised card reader

big man Hulk Hogan fits in this car but women can't see over the dash

Ramsey/Sleeper architectural graphics standards are created by men like me and for the most part they are correct, since cars are made to fit both tall men like Hulk Hogan and petite women like Susan Lucci and so are the buildings, but me an Mr. Hogan generally don't shop at the cosmetic counters and me and my big friend don't carry a handbag ,nor do we walk around with multitude of shopping bags nether we care to test things but ladies do, and this was true twenty years ago in UK so was true nineteen years ago when I created the Circle of Beauty and was true when I had to fight tooth and nail with the architects at Fitzpatrick Design Group to implement what I call Woman Centric Design while working on the prototype of ULTA store in Texas and yes we succeeded in convincing ULTA but afterwords I did catch one of FDG's architects repeatedly bang his head to the cement wall outside of our offices in Manhattan while waiting for an elevator ...

Now, you ask why such a long winded rant on lowering the counter and the the whole thing on the merits of shopping bag? this is to explain why I am showing you my low profile layouts but unfortunately this cant be proven with drawing an computer simulations ,only with a foam-core model...

Architect's Bible

A very primitive hand bag area..

1st- why as a designer/merchandiser should we care? the answer lays in free valuable shop-able merchandising space both height-wise and depth-wise and an added bonus; since the shopper is looking at the proper angle at the display, products in the back looks just as important as the ones in front just as in this photo from No7 project may convey.

2nd- What is this whole hoopla about hand bags and shopping bags? lets face it we don't need a DARPA study to figure out that most ladies carry either a hand/shoulder bag or a shopping bad or perhaps both and to get her to stop and test in order to indues buying she needs both of her hands, and both studies and casual observation shows that they almost never place their hand bag on the floor or any adjacent aria and most are polite enough not to place a shopping bag on liquid foundation testers aether...


One of my scale models studding shopper dynamics :-)

Circle of Beauty's drawer merchandiser

This was realized in Europe long ago and I had to relinquish 4 inches of the very front of the Boots units just for that task, but lets face it now even the whiskey bar operators know that fact, and they offer hidden or folding hooks for ever increasing female bar clientele, while I think its a good idea to incorporate a folding hook to every fixture we make in the POP industry. But it was this hand bag area that made both testing and full stock merchandizing possible with the Sears project a year later. unlike Europe where 3 stock products are acceptable Sears wanted a 6 plus stock so they had to be placed in shelves and drawers just below the testing aria and since after the testing the potential shopper is now almost literally standing on top of the display with her knees leaning ageist the very front of the counter , the clear glass in this hand bag zone is the only indication that there are product below for sale...