VM communicates your product stories: Tim Radley

Visual Merchandising begins with the product and communicates the product stories. Giving more insight on the same during his session at In-Store Asia 2015, Tim Radley, MD and Founder of UK-based VM-unleashed, spoke about "Visual Merchandising - Leveraging new Technology to build customer interactivity.”

"VM is about your place creating the customer journey. How much product to put in your places? How to make your places sell? VM is about your people from boardroom to stockroom. VM is about your people. VM is about emotion and communicating your retail DNA,” Radley explained.

According Radley, emotional merchanding includes absolute necessity and complex desire. "Absolute necessity is practical, planned, regular, commodity, budgeted and price oriented whereas complex desire is frivolous, spontaneous, unique, gift, indulgent and emotionally oriented.”

Radley said, "Technology is not emotion. Technology is just a tool. Retail is complicated and we all need tools.” Sharing his thoughts about the challenges faced by VM today, he said that VM has a wider variety of store shapes and sizes allocating an ever-changing assortment. It delivers attractive and compelling visual displays in every product and shop combination delivering a consistent brand message. It also delivers a customized brand message.

"Further challenges remain the problem of organizational structures, processes and tools across wider international portfolios coordinating more diverse workforce cultures. This is appealing to more varieties of demographic customer profile and there's a necessity to manage all of these ever-present issues in the context of the omni-channel retail world,” He concluded.