Visual Merchandising Best Practices: Planning, Compliance, and Innovation That Delivers Results
To be the best, you need to learn from the best — and visual merchandising is no exception.
Poor visual merchandising costs retailers an estimated $125 billion per year, but what about exceptional visual merchandising?
The best teams know it’s not just about creating beautiful displays. It’s about shaping experiences that inspire customers and deliver results, pairing creativity with precision, discipline, and innovation.
As visual merchandising expert Karl McKeever put it:
“Visual merchandising is an indispensable retail discipline… the silent salesperson.”
Here’s what sets the best visual merchandising teams apart (and how you can follow their lead):
They Plan With Precision
High-performing teams treat planning as both a creative and operational discipline.
Instead of relying on static planograms or one-size-fits-all templates, they design flexible frameworks that account for store diversity, product mix, and brand goals.
By pairing creativity with data and digital tools (like the Digital Store Model), elite visual merchandisers design experiences that are inspiring, scalable, and consistent across every store.
Example: Sephora is undertaking a multi-year initiative to reassess and redesign every store in its fleet, an effort grounded in both data and design intuition.
By analyzing shopper behavior, heat maps, and productivity data, Sephora identified opportunities to refine layouts and enhance the customer experience.
For instance, insights revealed that customers disliked having their makeup done in front of the main store windows, leading to a redesign that placed them off to the side with improved lighting.
The retailer also standardized gondola displays for key categories and introduced modular fixtures to make updates faster and more flexible.
This balance of art and science, using data to inform strategy while leaving room for trend-driven creativity, has already paid off. After redesigning over 100 stores, Sephora reported measurable gains across transactions, productivity, and sales.
They Align Creativity With Strategy
For leading retailers, visual merchandising isn’t just design. It’s strategy.
Great teams start with brand objectives and shopper insights, then translate them into purposeful visual stories that reinforce both.
McKeever explains: “There will never be anything more powerful than an attractively merchandised shop — well-presented fixtures, logical systems, and imaginative features.”
The best teams elevate design into a driver of brand identity and shopper engagement, not just a backdrop.
Example: With nearly 400 stores worldwide, every Aesop store balances global brand consistency with local cultural cues, creating a distinctive sense of place:
“In each of our stores around the world, we aim to marry a locally relevant design vocabulary with an underlying aesthetic consistency, drawing material and conceptual inspiration from each location.”
In Tokyo, one Aesop location draws inspiration from the steadily flowing Meguro River and the understated hospitality of a mid-century Japanese home, evoking a sense of refined domesticity.
In Brisbane, the store design features a dramatic, semi-translucent fiberglass shell nodding to Queensland’s tropical climate, while in New York’s Upper West Side, preserved dry-cleaning signage and timber shelving pay homage to the building’s history.
They Go Above and Beyond Visuals
It’s easy to assume visual merchandising is purely… visual.
But leading retailers worldwide have proven that the most memorable brand experiences often come from engaging more than just the eyes.
By appealing to all five senses, they create deeper connections and stronger brand recall (up to a 70% improvement compared to single-sensory experiences):
- Smell – Hollister is instantly recognizable by its signature amber-and-coconut fragrance, pumped through stores to create an olfactory brand experience of being on a California beach.
- Touch – Lush encourages tactile exploration with open-crate market-style displays that invite customers to touch, smell, and test cosmetic products directly on the sales floor.
- Taste – Nespresso goes beyond the “free sample.” Their in-store tasting bars let customers savor the aroma and flavor of coffee blends, forging a direct sensory connection to the product.
- Sound – Sonos elevates its luxury positioning with listening rooms where shoppers can immerse themselves in high-fidelity audio, experiencing the product as they would at home.
They Treat Compliance as a Reflection of Excellence
Great visual merchandising teams see store compliance as proof of their own clarity and discipline. If displays can’t be executed consistently, their job is to revisit the guidelines — not the execution.
For these creatives, compliance isn’t a restriction. It’s about providing clear, adaptable instructions that bring displays to life as intended.
And the results speak for themselves.
According to the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, properly executed displays can boost customer satisfaction by 5%, strengthening brand perception and encouraging repeat visits.
Similarly, research published in the Journal of Marketing found that well-designed, consistently executed displays can increase sales by up to 540% compared to disorganized or cluttered ones.
For top-shelf visual merchandisers, compliance isn’t about box-checking. It’s the key to translating creative vision into reality, unlocking both customer delight and measurable growth.
Compliance is creativity realized.
They Leverage Feedback for Continuous Innovation
Elite teams don’t stop once a campaign goes live. They evaluate:
- How displays perform against business goals
- How shoppers respond in-store
- How layouts influence engagement
They use those insights to refine future campaigns, turning visual merchandising into a craft of continuous improvement.
Example: Whole Foods Market is rethinking its store design with customer feedback at the center. Insights revealed pain points like congestion, cluttered entryways, and missed sales from pickup customers.
In response, the retailer opened “dark stores” to reduce congestion, refreshed pickup areas to encourage basket growth, and rethought layouts to restore aesthetics. Even its experiment with cashierless tech was adjusted after feedback showed it felt impersonal.
(Learn more how consumers are really responding to the future of shopping: AI.)
By treating customer insights as continuous input, Whole Foods ensures each new concept, like its upcoming small-format Daily Shop, builds stronger experiences.
The Benchmark of Excellence
The best teams excel because they plan with precision, align design with strategy, treat compliance as a creative discipline, and leverage insights for improvement.
These traits are what separate good from great merchandising, the kind that inspires shoppers, strengthens brands, and drives results.
Ready to Strengthen Your Visual Merchandising?
Great teams know creativity thrives when supported by clarity, efficiency, and smart processes.
But, too often, visual merchandisers juggle scattered tools, bad communication practices, and competing demands.
Our Consolidating Visual Merchandising Guide reveals how to:
- Ditch disorganized communication
- Align HQ and visual merchandising strategies
- Build data-driven insights into everyday campaign planning
- Replace guesswork with real-time store transparency
Visual merchandisers are at the center of creating the best in-store experiences. Learn how to streamline collaboration, unlock efficiency, and deliver excellence across every campaign.
Get the Guide: Consolidating Visual Merchandising Efforts for Maximized Outcomes