Work That Shop Floor

This post is regarding the Retail Marketing assignment for the fashion Industry Essentials course I'm taking up with Parsons. It requires us students to analyze a certain store setup, and come up with reasons why it works to the store's benefit.

And for my assignment, I'm choosing to analyze one of the H&M stores in the Philippines.

The whole store is painted and set up in a muted palette. Stark white walls, clear rimmed ceiling lamps, and acrylic sculptural accents adorn the whole store; and this provides the perfect backdrop for the brightly colored pieces from the store's every collection. Given the niche that the H&M caters to, the store's calming walls, floors, and ceilings provide that needed break from the hustle and bustle of city life that it's urbanized clients are so used to. And the way the garments are hung beneath the white and chrome racks just allow the clients to see every detail even from far away.

Angela Gao also talked about the different layouts stores use for marketing purposes, and she talked about three: the grid, the spine, and the racetrack loop. She says that stores often use at least one of these three, but in the case of H&M they are able to use all three given the huge floor space they have. But H&M was wise enough to use a certain layout for a certain garment category. For the racetrack loop layout, it was used for the pieces with more detail on them, as to keep the customers going around to fully appreciate the fine details of each piece. The grid layout was used on the part where a huge selection of in-season pieces were displayed. It was upon entering the store that pieces in grid layouts were presented as to be able to showcase as much of the newer stuff they had. Lastly, the spine layout was used to display more of the basic pieces like: tees, shirts, and sweaters. This was used for those who want to have a more breezy and quick shopping trip. The people who know what they want are more likely to get whatever it is that they go to the shop for in the section with the spine layout.