Space Planning

Once a retailer decides what to buy from vendors and how much of it to allocate to specific stores, someone needs to decide where in the stores the products will sit. This is a very important step in retail since store layouts are crucial to the shopping experience. Products need to be easy to locate, near related products, and have the correct facings. Should this product be on the endcap? Should it be at eye level? Should it have 8 facings or 10? Space management is about maximizing every inch of the selling floor.

Traditionally, headquarters creates a limited number of planograms (PoG) that define where products go for a particular store format. Unfortunately, not all stores are the same. Not only do their formats vary, but there’s usually a degree of localization that makes them even more unique. So often the corporate PoG is treated as advice only and compliance is low. The answer is more collaboration between headquarters and the store. An increase of 10% in compliance can decrease stock-outs by 1%, and that leads to higher sales.