Visual merchandisers remain a crucial part of the customer experience to drive sales, even with the influx of AI. However, they need to adapt to stay ahead of the curve.
AI is emerging as a powerful tool, especially when adopted as a lever to get ahead. It revolutionizes visual merchandising and drives efficiency across the entire process, from campaign planning to planogram optimization.
So, what does adopting AI look like for visual merchandising?
Efficiency and Cost Reduction
AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of data, including sales data, foot traffic patterns, and historical planograms. This is used to automate decision-making and streamline operations. This automation saves time while enabling retailers to make more informed, data-driven choices, leading to highly optimized store layouts and assortments while reducing costs and friction at every step.
Enhanced Performance and Customer Engagement
By quickly adapting to evolving customer tastes and preferences, AI enhances store performance, boosting customer engagement, satisfaction, sales, and ultimately brand loyalty. AI-powered systems enable retailers to align their offerings more effectively with market demands, ensuring a personalized shopping experience that resonates with targeted customer bases.
Bridging the Digital-Physical Divide
AI bridges the gap between the digital and physical store experience, seamlessly integrating online and offline channels to create a streamlined and personalized shopping journey. AI-driven insights facilitate better support for omni-channel merchandising strategies, ensuring a cohesive shopping experience across various platforms.
Giving Visual Merchandisers Time Back
AI prioritizes improving the quality of life for visual merchandising teams by automating repetitive tasks and providing valuable insights. This empowerment allows employees to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors, enhancing job satisfaction, quality of work, and overall well-being. With AI-based tools, visual merchandisers regain their weekends, and weekday evenings, while improving their work quality.
Assortment Planning Optimization
AI drives assortment planning optimization and automation, utilizing virtual store simulations and data to predict and refine product assortments based on market trends and customer behavior. Dynamic store layouts continuously adapt to changing consumer preferences, maximizing the shopping environment’s impact, along with brand loyalty, and ensuring an optimal product placement strategy.
At One Door, we’ve been building solutions for visual merchandisers for over 20 years. While AI is a newer development, we build out for the future to help visual merchandising and retail teams create success now and for countless years to come. Tools like Image IQ to help monitor store compliance, and Store Assistant to streamline efforts from planning to execution, help visual merchandisers make a bigger impact in less time.
We’re excited to adapt to the future of retail, are you ready?