What a Visual Merchandising Expert from Gap Inc. Reveals About Digital Planograms and Retail Execution
Storytelling is foundational to great visual merchandising, but in today’s retail industry, the challenge is ensuring that the story shows up consistently in every location.
Then: Visual Merchandising Was Physical and Hard to Scale
Visual merchandising was once a highly manual discipline. Teams would build physical store pilots, using mock square footage to design layouts, test product placement, and bring campaigns to life before mass rollouts.
This hands-on approach allowed for maximum creativity and control, but it didn’t easily scale. As retailers expanded the campaign across hundreds of locations, keeping the story consistent became increasingly difficult.
Each store introduced variability, and static processes made it harder to execute campaigns the same way everywhere.
Why Digital Planograms Outperform Paper (Or Nothing at All)
The gap between planning and execution often comes down to how information reaches field teams. Anthony Perrotta, a former visual merchandiser for specialty retailers, including Alex and Ani and Gap Inc., observed a clear difference between digital and paper-based approaches.
He noticed retailers that used digital POGs had “far better” store compliance rates, “because the information was more readily available and navigable for associates.”
Perrotta noted that retailers that used PDF guidelines, sent via email, often included outdated information due to promotional changes or unavailable products.
Paper-based processes are often slow, with limited visual clarity, delayed updates, and damaged materials. Stores may not get the full picture, both figuratively and literally, introducing a breakdown between merchandising intent and in-store execution.
Now: The Shift to Digital Planning and Store Execution
As retail accelerated, so did the need for speed and scalability. Perrotta describes how teams moved toward digital tools for store planning and execution:
“Creating digital renderings of the various merchandising solutions [helped retailers] move faster to meet customers’ expectations.”
Digital planograms improve how merchandising strategies are created and communicated, but they don’t guarantee execution. The real challenge is ensuring those plans translate into consistent, accurate execution across every location.
“We worked on visual merchandising guides that went to 300+ stores where thousands of associates relied on them. The challenge was to make planograms easily understandable for store teams.
Imagery and rendering in planograms became increasingly important to the successful communication of visual merchandising intent. They [ensured] the consistency of the brand voice from store to store and [provided] a visual presentation for each visual merchandising story.”
2026 Reflection: What Visual Merchandisers Got Right and What’s Changed
Visual merchandisers have always been responsible for translating brand storytelling into physical space. What’s changed is what that responsibility now requires.
In the past, the focus was on designing compelling in-store experiences, creating layouts, displays, and visual narratives that reflected the brand.
Today, the challenge is ensuring those experiences are executed consistently across every location. It requires considering how that idea is communicated, interpreted, and implemented in the field. That means ensuring planograms are:
- Clear enough for store teams to follow
- Accessible in the moment of execution
- Adaptable to real store conditions
That’s why visual merchandising has shifted from design to enablement. Creating the right experience is only the first step.
The rest of the workflow is about ensuring that experience can be understood, executed, and repeated at scale. Storytelling only works if it shows up.
The Bottom Line
Creative visual merchandising will always be about storytelling, but in today’s retail environment, storytelling alone isn’t enough.
In retail, the brand is what the customer actually experiences, not what’s designed, and that experience only exists when planning, execution, and reality are fully aligned.
Download Dynamic Planograms: The Missing Link Between Planning and Execution to see how leading specialty retailers ensure what’s planned actually shows up in-store.