Cannabis

It's a new world! Watching a commodity grow from black market to normalized retail is fascinating. 

As reform sweeps across the nation, Pot Shops are popping up on the retail frontier in droves. While the best practices of “normalized” retail apply to Pot Shops, there are subtleties that must be addressed with store design and customer-facing operations to create an excellent shopper experience.  For example, How does an ID check at the front door change the shoppers’ mood?  What does the shopper’s HUGE learning curve mean for associates (budtenders)? How do shoppers navigate a cash-only enviroment?  How do they navigate shopping a product they can’t touch?

So many Pot Shop owners are genius about cannabis and not-so-savvy about retail.  That’s where AML Insights comes in!

Is your store up to a better-than-normalized retail standard?  What makes a pot shop a GREAT shop?  The same things that make any store great... AND then some.  

Blog Post: Pot Shop Windows

 In an industry where windows are highly regulated do windows even matter in pot shops?  YES!!!! 

As shoppers, we expect a store to have WINDOWS and for those windows to serve specific purposes (who's this store for? what does this store sell? what's the vibe here? is it open??) every pot shop deserves a good window. 

Let's make yours great.

Window of Opportunity:  Know how much time people spend in front of your window space. The average time to passby a window (whether in a mall or on the street) is 3 seconds.  Work within this window of opportunity.  Send a message that can be absorbed in 3 seconds or less.

Proximity:  How near or far are people from your window? Use this info to scale the size of the display. Smaller intricate window displays will only read to people passing a few feet from the glass, a larger display is necessary for those driving by or across the street. It's possible that you need BOTH if you have both types of passers.

Show versus Tell:  The fewer words you use in a window the better. Send messages via props and products and images rather than text.

Capture Attention:  Incorporating movement (real or perceived), using dramatic lighting and canting the display to face passersby (versus head-on) are all ways to capture passers' attention.

Keep It Fresh:  Changing something in the window every 3-5 weeks will keep shoppers looking.  If the window stays static, attention wanes and shoppers stop looking. 

Don't waste any opportunities to pull eyes to your store. Your windows are a valuable tool– Use them!

 

Main Street/Indie Retail

Working with Seanette Corkill of Frontdoor Back, we serve independent retailers who face the same challenges as the national brands but have few (if any) of their resources.  We believe that strong stores make a strong community.

 

We deliver a 90-minute seminar that puts all of Main Street’s stakeholders (services, retailers, property owners, etc.) in the same room to learn the same retail principles and speak the same retail language.  We follow this up with one-on-one consultations with the business owners to hear about their successes and frustrations and to evaluate the store through our retail expert eyes.

We start at the building façade, making sure that there’s curb appeal with the building and capture power with its windows.  We walk the retailer through their store from entry, through a shopper journey, to the cashwrap experience and back out the door making sure that they are aware of every customer facing issue. We help identify profit centers and to be sure those centers are strategically located within the store.  Taking what we’ve learned from the national chains and sharing it in bite-sized, pragmatic, usable pieces of advice has helped hundreds of independent retailers. Teaching moments range from which light bulbs to use and how much text to use on signs to store layout and ambiance.  Consultation with independent retailers is the most rewarding work we do!

Eye Wear/Eye Care

Eye Care professionals live in a world where patients are shoppers and doctors are retailers. When a large percentage of revenue comes from product sales, it’s imperative that the office serve as a sales tool and lead people to shop during their eye appointments. We teach optical service providers how to make the most of their selling space.  From visual merchandising to product placement, everything matters in these small spaces.    

 

Retail at Large

It’s true that the Internet is changing how we shop.  It’s also true that the physical store is more important than ever.  Shoppers are seeking two diverse things from their retailers: an amazingly convenient solution and a rich sensory experience. Good stores know how to deliver on both. 

We help retailers by giving them a shopper’s perspective of their stores and their competitors.  We identify pain points and little bits of happy in the shopper’s journey to paint the picture of the real in-store experience. AML is a boots-on-the-ground research agency that brings the shopper journey into the decision-making boardroom.