The Retail Expert Series features Krista Raymer, CEO of Vetrina Group, a leading cannabis retail consultancy.
In this segment, Raymer shares her thoughts about why thinking about your cannabis store floor plan is so important, how to measure if your cannabis store floor plan is working and some tips and tricks for current or would-be cannabis store owners and operators.
Learn more about Krista Raymer and the team at Vetrina Group.
Retail Expert with Krista Raymer – Floor Plan Pt. 1
Hi, I’m Krista, the founder of Vetrina Group. We work with Cannabis Retailers and Licensed Producers to take data, turn it into insights, and insights into action points. Today, we’re going to talk about some of the key areas of retail with the Business of Cannabis, and how we can make these environments better.
Part 1: Floor Plan
So today we’re going to talk about floor plans; why they’re important and how they impact your business, how we measure whether we need to make a change, and some tips and tricks for when you are planning your environment.
Floor Plan Importance
First, a floor plan is really a map of where everything is going to go in store. This includes lighting, fixtures, and maybe even electrical outlets. It’s really important to think about all of the details prior to committing to organizing the store, so that we can get all of the pieces of the retail environment in the right place, for the right time.
Why this is important, is because the floor plan is going to directly connect with your customer and guide the customer through the store; which ultimately influences what products they see, when they see them in their journey in the store, and what opportunities our budtenders have to interact with our customers.
Floor Plan Measurements
Second, we’re going to think about how we measure floor plans and what impact they actually have on the business.
A floor plan is going to create discovery with our customers; if we’re doing a really great job with discovery, then we should also be able to influence what KPIs–or Key Performance Indicators–are going to show up in our numbers.
The floor plan is going to directly impact the quality of sale. So that means our average-per-customer, and our units-per-transaction, are really great ways to measure if we have the right product, in the right place, in the right time, in our cannabis retail store. If we see a change in our average-per-customer or our units-per-customer, we might want to make an adjustment as to the way that our customer travels through the store. This could include moving fixtures or repositioning cash desks to ensure that we are getting our customer all the way through the environment.
Another area that we can check in the store, to see if we’re doing a really great job with the floor plan or layout, is checking if our customers are using the whole store. An often KPI that we see used to measure the success of a retail environment, is sales per square foot; so our floor plan is going to directly impact where those sales are happening.
Floor Plan Tips & Tricks
Let’s talk about some tips and tricks when we think about floor plans for cannabis retail stores.
First one, is that we should always be including a ‘Decompression Zone’. A Decompression Zone is that fancy space right after the entrance, that allows our customer to really take in the entire environment. They’re about to go on a journey; so we need them to acclimatize and see the entire store from that viewpoint.
One of the areas that you could think about this is in a grocery store; right after you enter those first double doors, you can see the entire store. We want to do the same thing.
The second tip is that customers in North America–or people who generally drive on the right side of the road–tend to always go right. This means that if we position fixtures, for example, on the left-hand side early in the customer journey, they tend not to get seen. So we want to focus on where our fixtures are going to go, and anticipate that our customers are always going to go right.
One of the ways that we might want to measure this, is when we think about our average sale-per-square-foot. This would be an indicator of how well we are driving revenue throughout the entire environment; and if we’re paying rent, we want to be driving revenue throughout the entire environment.
Finally, we want to make a consideration about if we’re creating an environment that creates a ‘highway’ to the cash desk. This essentially is a straight line that our customer can go from the front door, all the way to the cash desk, without interacting with anything in the retail environment. This is detrimental to the average-per-customer, because we haven’t created an opportunity for the customer to explore what other products we have in the store.
So, what we want to be able to do is break up those lines with fixtures, or other aspects within our retail environment, to guide our customer through the store before they get to the cash.
Thanks for joining us today! If you have more questions or want to know how to drive a profitable retail environment in cannabis, you can reach out to me [Krista Raymer] directly at Vetrina Group.
We have more awesome content just like this, that will be on businessofcannabis.com.
More from Vetrina Group
Watch and read more from Krista Raymer and Vetrina Group:
- February 2022 | How brands and retailers may interact in Ontario right now
- January 2022 | Building your cannabis inventory plan right now
- December 2021 | Understanding cannabis retail density right now
- November 2021 | 3 takeaways from Lift&Co. Expo
- October 2021 | A look at the cannabis industry’s Las Vegas show week
- September 2021 | What happened at Hall of Flowers Santa Rosa 2021?
