Creative retail display is an art. With it, you can showcase your products so that customers will be drawn to them and want to buy them. Your retail displays should generally be near store areas that see regular foot traffic, so that customers will be "in the flow" of shopping, walk by, and buy. They should also be attention-grabbing, since simple displays can often blend into the background so that customers won't even see them. And finally, they should be set up so that customers can access products easily.
Beyond these few simple requirements, how you choose to arrange your retail displays is really up to you, once you take space and store layout specifics into consideration. Today's retail fixtures allow you to arrange displays in just about any configuration you choose.
Where to look for creative retail display resources
With all of this freedom, though, you may find yourself scratching your head when you try to come up with new and creative retail display ideas. Where can you find them?
Look online
The first and probably best place to turn to is right at your fingertips – the Internet. The key is to find sites with changing content and fresh ideas, resources you can turn to again and again. Try these sites to see what others are doing for their own retail displays, and use their ideas to generate your own:
As a kind of "corkboard for the Internet," Pinterest is a website that allows people to share photos of their favorite things, usually based around a hobby, interest, event, and so on. It's also a great place to look for others' retail display ideas. Simply typing in keywords such as "creative retail displays" will bring up a plethora of ideas. You can also narrow results based upon your particular area of retail, such as jewelry.
There are individual users' idea "boards" for creative retail displays, or you can do a general search on "creative retail displays" to bring up individual "pins" from all users. Because Pinterest's content is continually changed and added to all the time by its users, you should rarely run out of fresh approaches to spark your own ideas.
Retail design or "visual merchandizing" blogs
Any good business knows that if its site is going to stay fresh and relevant for the search engines, it has to have regularly updated content. That's where blogs come in, and they can prove to be a very valuable resource for new retail display ideas. "Visual merchandizing" often focuses on window displays, which may or may not also be valuable for your business, but you can often adjust the ideas you find here to create your own displays specific to your own space. (Those that also contain instructions on the display's set-up are particularly useful, of course.)
Read professional articles online
Blog and social media sites are probably the best places for new and cutting-edge ideas, but other sites that focus on the entrepreneur have good ideas, too. Look occasionally to see what's new out there. Although the information you'll find may sometimes be outdated, there may also be good foundational information that will get you started. Once you figure out your approach, use blogs and other cutting-edge sources to keep your ideas fresh.
Check out other stores
Finally, don't be afraid to check out your local competition, to see what they're doing for their own retail displays. It may be bad form to copy directly, but you can certainly get ideas that will help spark your own creative juices.
