Downtown Locker Room: Shoe Bar, Baltimore

Design/Fixtures/Photography
Winntech, Kansas City, Mo.

Retailer Downtown Locker Room, Hanover, Md.

Dimensions Approximately 12 ft. long, 2 ft. 6 in. deep with towers up to 5 ft. 1 in. high capped by 8-sq.-in. chrome plates

Materials frosted plexiglass, chrome, plastic laminate, powder-coated tubular steel

Merchandise featured Urban footwear

Target market Primarily 18- to 25-year-old African-American males

The Challenge: Less is More … Really!
With locations throughout the Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Virginia markets, Downtown Locker Room already had high-volume sales of its urban apparel and footwear when co-founder Rick Levin met the Winntech team at GlobalShop. The average customer buys 30 pairs of shoes a year and shops the store a couple of times a week for T-shirts, hats, CDs, and accessories. Increasing sales per square foot would be no small feat.

The biggest challenge was Levin’s concept of merchandising, Barrett Prelogar recalled.
Downtown Locker Room’s sales volume is dictated by its target market’s cultural peer pressure to wear only new items. “Shirts must have ‘crisp’ on. They have no charisma when they’ve been washed a couple of times. Similarly, when scuff marks appear on shoes, they lose their attraction, so customers come in to buy their clothes for the next few days,” Prelogar explained. The low-priced (T-shirts cost no more than $5) merchandise was therefore crammed into the stores, with as much on the floor and walls as possible. The typical store, for instance, carries 200 models of footwear and rotates through thousands of shoe SKUs throughout the course of a year. Levin was trying to figure out how to fit yet more merchandise into his stores, so the Winntech team had its work cut out convincing him to try boosting sales per square foot with better design—and less merchandise on the floor.

Among the tools used to sell Levin on new fixture designs were 3D visual representations in form-Z modeling software. “We do a lot of work in form-Z. It’s a good way to instill a level of comfort with the client,” said Prelogar.

New fixtures included a cashwrap and “interactive items” such as the What’s Hot display to showcase popular CDs, etc. Few graphics were incorporated in order to let the products do the talking. To minimize clutter, the new design features less stock on the floor. Shelf space is so coveted by product manufacturers that they actually rent space on some fixtures, restocking the fixtures themselves.

The new shoe display fixture needed to stop customers in their tracks because Levin knew that once they saw the latest styles, something new would be bound to “hook” them—especially since the shoe area was already a hotspot where his customers go to “see and be seen.”

The Solution: The Latest Shoe Styles, Straight Up
The Shoe Bar helps ensure that footwear sales keep pace without requiring a mass of shoes on the floor. The word downtown in the retailer’s name was the inspiration for a cityscape fixture. Each featured shoe is showcased on the top of a tower reminiscent of a skyscraper as seen in a downtown skyline.

With frosted plexiglass “walls,” towers are lit by fluorescent tubes with colored sheaths, evoking images of a city’s neon lights. Non-illuminated towers are made of plastic laminate. During the design process, the Winntech team tested for problems caused by heat transmission from the bulbs, but the towers proved up to the challenge.

Each grouping of towers is on wheels so that the scene can be reconfigured and featured shoes can be switched out one grouping at a time. This helps employees keep the display fresh easily, keeping customers hotfooting it to the display to see what’s new.

The plastic laminate tower tops of an early prototype were scrapped in favor of 8-inch chrome plate tops for the shoes to rest on.

To capitalize on the hotspot perception of the shoe area, the entire footwear display area is designed to mimic a bar—an idea suggested by Levin himself once he embraced Winntech’s creative concepts. Powder-coated bent tubular steel serves as a bar rail, while the countertop is plastic laminate. Frosted plexiglass (the kind commonly used in shower doors) spans fixed front towers. Bar benches consist of plastic laminate.

Every good bar needs a bartender to see to customers’ needs, and the Shoe Bar is no exception. Customers belly up to the bar to order shoes. An employee stationed behind the counter—i.e., the Shoe Bartender—radios orders for styles and sizes to personnel at the back of the store via a wireless headset. A “runner” then brings the correct pair of shoes within moments to the shopper.

Bouncers, though, one might be harder pressed to find. Like the What’s Hot fixture, the Shoe Bar has no security device. After considering security options, Levin determined that the opportunity cost was too high to use security devices. “He feels his customers pay his salary, so he does not want to make them feel like they are in a jail cell,” explained Prelogar.