Orgill needed nearly 18.5 acres of space to show off all its wares during its Spring Dealer Marketon Feb. 16-18. But even with 800,000 square feet of the New Orleans Convention Center to stretch out across, it still was mindful that many dealers lack space. So in part to that end, one of its two model store concepts sought to show how to pack more products into nearly 10,000 square feet of space. Here are three ideas from that model hardware and supply store, plus one more picked up from a vendor’s display.
1. Pull-Out Shelving
Placing items like switchplates in pull-out drawers lets you do two things at once. First, you can put more drawers in the same space because you don’t need to worry about having room above a fixed shelf to reach in and pull out the product. And second, you can put one SKU behind another.
+++
2. Sliders
If you have relatively shallow SKUs that hang on pegs, consider putting in sliding planograms that enable customers to pluck items both from the front and the back.
+++
3. Shallow End Caps
If you have aisles that stretch from the entrance side of the store to where they nearly hit a back wall, it’s quite possible that you’ve focused on the end cap facing you as you enter the aisle but not the space on the aisle near the back wall. That’s often because you don’t have enough space between the end of the aisle and the wall. Orgill suggests you take up some of that space with a shallow end cap–no more than a foot deep–that you could devote to something special, like pet products.
+++
4. Re-Orient Fastener Boxes
While Orgill was touting the three ideas above, at the Midwest Fasteners booth you could see a variation on how fastener boxes are displayed. At left above is the usual way: The rectangular box sits wide on a storage unit that’s relatively shallow. At right is an alernative: Set up the storage units so they are as deep as the fastener box is wide, and then put two of them long ways into the storage space. By adding a few inches of deph, you end up getting far more fasteners into the same horizontal and vertical space.
