Small business retail advice: less is more when it comes to visual noise in your shop

As retailers ourselves for decades, we have learnt first-hand that less is more works when it comes to visual noise in the shop.

Less signs, posters and other visual blocks can impede retail sales. Here’s our practical, no nonsense approach to reducing visual noise in pursuit of sales growth.

If you give your customers too many things to look at inside or outside your business, they will notice less.  Your choices show them what you want them to look at

Less is more. Have less visual noise, less visual pollution, and more will be noticed.

Show your customers what you want them to notice by giving that product, range or display fresh air (visually) around it.

Take a look today, right now, at the visual noise in your shop. It is easy:

Stand at the door of your business facing into the shop and scan around counting the signs you can read and displays you can see.

How many are there?

More messages, more signs = less noticing them.

Yes, less is more.

Here is advice for less visual noise in your business:

1. Edit. Every few days stand at the front of the shop and review your signage and edit the mix.
2. Posters and signs. Do not put up any poster or sign unless it is absolutely necessary.
3. Housekeeping notices. Have all customer notices, such as your exchange policy, discount policy, minimum eftpos charge etc, all in the one unobtrusive place. Neat. Clean.
4. Call to action signs. If you have items on sale or discounted, place them all in the one location, a designated sale location in your business, with simple and professional signage.
5. Product signs. For product signage in-store, be consistent in style and look. Smaller signs next to products will work better than big signs from the ceiling – how often do your shoppers walk in looking up anyway?
6. Colour block. Colour blocked product is more appealing to the eye, it looks less messy, less noisy.
7. The counter.  Again, edit for clarity, edit for focus on the messages that really matter.
8. Be clean. Look for clean sight lines, where your products are the feature. Use products themselves to tell stories.

It is common for retailers to say that shoppers don’t look in the shop. An alternative what to look at this is to say that you are going about trying to catch shopper attention in the wrong way.

Reducing visual noise will improve the experience for your shoppers and for those who work in the business. It will focus everyone on what you decide matters the most right now.

This visual boise advice applied to your front window if you have one. What’s the message? Is it clear? Is it focussed? Is it getting attention on the street? the answers will guide you as to what to do next.

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Thanks to our retail experience, we are able to provide suggestions b beyond the POS software. This is another differentiating factor for us, for which we are sincerely grateful.