|
Best Buy Chelsea Digital Platform, New York
 Design Best Buy Co., Eden Prairie, Minn.
Fixtures Retailer Services Corp., Anoka, Minn.
Retailer Best Buy Co., Eden Prairie, Minn.
Photography John Wadsworth, Wadsworth Alliance Corp., Norfolk, Va.
In the Beginning
Best Buy originated about 38 years ago in Minneapolis-St. Paul, expanded south to Texas, and moved east and west from there, leaving both coasts as uncovered territory. A couple of years ago, the company decided that it needed a presence in Manhattan, but this market proved different from the company's prior experience.
"We have a saying at Best Buy, 'highway to end-cap.' Many of our buildings are near a highway or in a big mall, and you can see them from far away. But our real estate in Manhattan has almost no street presence," Lee explained. With no parking lot in front, the layout did not allow for the company's regular sign, the Best Buy price tag on a wedge-shaped storefront.
Customer research revealed more differences. "We couldn't send a truck to the dock door and unload whenever we liked. We had to schedule it," Lee said. "We learned that grab and go, which has kind of been the Best Buy model, takes on a whole new meaning in Manhattan and usually involves bypassing the check-out lane."
The Process of Great Design
Best Buy's display team typically has eight or nine weeks for development of the fixture program once the product mix has been determined, but this store may have taken a little longer, Lee recalled. With about 4,000 sq. ft. on the ground floor and about 30,000 sq. ft. in the basement, the space offered benefits as well as challenges.
"We have a subway exit right outside the window, so we were able to adjust our 'highway to end-cap' concept to 'subway to end-cap,'" Lee said. To maximize foot traffic and the company's presence, the team put digital technology such as cell phones, camcorders, cameras, and PDAs at street level, determining these items to be most likely to impress the New York market and inform them about Best Buy. Computers, big screen TVs, music, and movies were placed downstairs.
"We wanted to maintain our visual merchandising guidelines for color, material, and height and to enhance the selling strategy that would take place," Lee explained. The goal was for small fixtures to draw customers to the area, where their focus then would shift to the products. The team carefully considered the experience the customer should have- what the company wanted customers to see, hear, and do.
With an in-house design staff accustomed to thinking visually, Best Buy was able to forgo the detailed initial drawings that might have been required of designers making a presentation to an external client. Starting with rough sketches, the team began figuring out how to coordinate elements such as directional signing with the architecture of the space and the big TV that would serve as kind of a Best Buy brand statement.
"Once we had an idea of the fixture direction and knew what the architecture would give us, we could begin making it real. We went right to the computer and laid out how much product we're going to have, what the shape needs to be, what the size needs to be, etc.," Lee said. The team considered how much product needed to be displayed, the lifespan of the products, the amount of buried electronics and content required, trends for the products, whether any of the products were at the end or the beginning of their selling life, whether they represented a growth market, and whether any product categories were converging.
Lee explained how product category changes can affect fixture design. Computer departments and television, for instance, traditionally have been separate entities. But today, many new products will allow someone to perform line-blurring activities such as using a TV in one room to access information on a computer in another room. "As these products converge, it creates challenges. So we needed to understand the products we had in that area and try to predict their lifecycle and what they would end up doing."
The team dropped its final concepts into the rendered space to see how everything would work together. "An outstanding fixture that doesn't go well with the graphics or doesn't go well with the space is less than it could be, so we wanted to get everything together to understand the overall space and what it would communicate to the customer," Lee said.
The Final Creation: Award-Winning Store Fixtures
The main fixture, which won NASFM's Fixture of the Year Award, incorporated unique elements. Interchangeable tops to base cabinets allow personnel to change SKU assortments and enlarge or shrink areas. Inserts in the tops enable further flexibility to change product mixes or introduce new products.
"Still keeping with our Best Buy design guidelines and principles, we hope with this space to convey that we're an authority on technology," Lee said. "We tried to give our customers a nice, bright, open layout in contrast to other retail stores in New York."
Having heard horror stories about new stores in Manhattan, the team and Best Buy management anxiously awaited the store's initial performance. To their delight, the reports were favorable. "The store is exceeding expectations as far as sales and employee turnover. We are currently working on our next store and will probably open five or six in Manhattan over the next couple of years. It has turned out to be a good market for us," said Lee.
|
