In the first few seconds inside your store, shoppers notice three signals: whether they can tell what you sell, whether the place looks cared for, and whether anyone has seen them. Nothing else has registered yet. Those three impressions decide whether they walk your floor or turn around.
The trouble is you can't see your own store anymore. I couldn't see mine either, and I've got the pictures to prove it.
I was getting my degree at Chapman College, about an hour south of Glendale, and I had a job as manager of the Nunn Bush shoe shop in the brand new Glendale Galleria.
It was supposed to be the Brass Boot - much more high-end. I had a few trade magazines I could read about display but nothing else to learn from.
I can tell this one was January because there's the calendar sitting right in the window.
Look at all those props! The balloons! The bottle! All the confetti!
They took away from the shoes.
But I got one part right. The arch of a shoe looks better from the inside, and you can see I turned them that way.
And your eye travels, top down to the balloons.
This one's better. The rooster weather vane catches your interest first; there's what I now call my pig-in-the-window, and it balances on the other side.
Fifty years later I still can't judge a window standing inside the store. Few can.
My brother gave me a Polaroid SX-70 camera one Christmas and I've been taking window pictures ever since.
Here's what I do. When you're building the window, walk outside and take a picture of it.
Then take another one when you're done.
And don't look at the last one for 24 hours.
That gap is the whole trick. Come back to those pictures with your coffee and you'll see your window the way a stranger sees it, props and all.
Do the same standing at your front door, stand on the sidewalk and take a picture looking in. That view decides whether a shopper walks your floor.
If a stranger can't name your category from the doorway, nothing else on the floor matters.
Look at the photo and find your sightline. If the first fixture blocks the view into the store, your shopper is reading a wall, not a store. Even worse is something blocking the view in.
It can't sell on a high shelf and it can't sell in the backroom.
Look at the top of your photo. Anything above eye level is storage, not selling, and your shopper won't ask for a ladder. They also don't want to bend down to get something off the bottom floor for fear of their butt being touched by a passerby or cart.
A sale sign at the door trains shoppers to wait for a markdown.
Multiples with tape and expired promotions look worse. Start at the top, not the clearance tag. If the first message in your picture frame is a discount, that's what your store is now worth to them.
"It looked like nobody worked there"
Find the people in your photo.
If they're behind the counter, facing a screen, or in a huddle at the register, your shopper has already decided they're on their own.
A display has a job and a number, not a mood.
If nothing in the frame pulls the eye to one place, the shopper's eye lands on the exit.
Print it. Write the date on it. Take it to your next store meeting and ask your crew what a stranger sees. They'll tell you faster than you'd like.
Then fix one item in the frame this week. Not five.
Take a new picture next Monday and put the two side by side.
A better first impression buys you a shopper who stays 30 more seconds. What happens next decides whether you get the sale.
That's what SalesRX+ trains: the behaviors that turn a stranger into a customer, followed by an unannounced shop six months in that measures whether those behaviors actually changed on your floor. First evaluations average 30%, and shoppers were ignored outright at 7 of 12 stores.
More on making the floor sell: retail merchandising.
Whether they can tell what you sell, whether the store looks cared for, and whether an employee has acknowledged them. Those three read within seconds, before any individual piece of merchandise does.
Stand outside your front door and take one photo, then wait a day before you look at it. The delay is what lets you see the frame as a stranger instead of as the owner who walks past it daily.
Usually because nobody engaged them. See why "welcome in" isn't a greeting.