We’ve all heard sayings like, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” or “Seeing is believing.” People are often driven by their senses — and in the retail world, an attractive storefront or product display can make all the difference.
Don’t believe us? While some people walk into a store with a specific item in mind, over 70% of shoppers make their purchase decisions in-store, and 76% of shoppers enter a new store because of eye-catching signage.
In other words, without a visual merchandising strategy, you may be leaving money on the table. Creative store layouts and displays are an effective way to drive sales, attract new customers, and build your brand.
In this article, we’ll walk through the basics of liquor retail visual merchandising and give you a few examples of how you can use it in your liquor store.
What Is Visual Merchandising?
Visual merchandising refers to how retail stores use their physical layout, colors, lighting, technology, and displays to get customers’ attention. These are four key elements of retail visual merchandising:
- Color: A lot has been written about how colors bring out different emotions in shoppers. Using colors in your retail displays can create a sense of excitement or draw attention. For example, red and orange are often used for sales since they create a sense of urgency.
- Store layout: The spacing of your shelves, endcap displays, registers, and more can affect how customers engage with your store. A clear store layout helps determine where customers spend the majority of their time while browsing.
- Lighting: Lighting is used both to create an overall atmosphere for your store and to draw customers’ eyes to particular displays.
- Signage: Signage consists of price tags, window signs, banners, aisle labels, standing displays, and other printed materials that inform customers about your products. Effective signage helps customers navigate your liquor store, highlights promotions, and gives you a chance to build trust.
Related Read: Liquor Store Ideas: 5 Design and Display Ideas
Benefits of Great Liquor Store Visual Merchandising
It can be hard to come up with creative visual merchandising ideas when you’re focused on the day-to-day challenges of running a liquor store. However, investing some time in your store layout, signage, and displays can have major benefits for your business, such as:
- Increasing sales
- Attracting new customers
- Showing off your expertise
- Improving the customer experience
- Standing out from competitors
Visual merchandising is more than advertising. It’s a way to maximize your space and create a strong impression in customers’ minds.
Combined with other marketing strategies like customer loyalty programs and using social media, effective visual merchandising will help you quickly graduate from being “just another liquor store” to a local favorite.
8 Examples of Visual Merchandising for Liquor Stores
By now, it should be clear that adopting visual merchandising strategies in your liquor store is a must — but where to start?
First, consider what you have to work with. For example, if your space came with hanging fluorescent light fixtures, adjusting the lighting of your store is going to be a bigger (and more expensive) job. Instead, start by focusing on the areas that are the most cost-effective.
You could also use your liquor point of sale (POS) system to see what your top-selling items or categories are and develop visual merchandising strategies that highlight those products.
Here are eight examples of liquor store visual merchandising to help get your creative juices flowing.
1. Highlight Deals and Popular Products With Endcap Displays
Endcap displays are standing shelves that sit at the end of your aisle. They’re also one of the most effective merchandising tools in your arsenal. Endcaps are highly visible, can be customized with pictures and text, and are the first thing customers see when they enter an aisle.
Use your endcaps to highlight popular items and make recommendations. Try to theme your endcaps for each section of your store. For example, you could place wine glasses and decanters on the endcap of a wine aisle. Or put your staff picks for bourbons and whiskeys in front of the whiskey aisle.
Don’t be afraid to test new ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. Just remember to regularly rotate the items on your endcaps to help pique customer curiosity and have them wondering what might be there next.
2. Entice Shoppers With Seasonal Displays
People love to crack a few beers or open a bottle to celebrate the holidays. Your displays and store layout can help them do just that. Display popular items for various holidays or seasons and feature them prominently at the front of the store.
Related Read: Creative Mardi Gras Marketing Ideas for Your Liquor Store
You could set up a fixed seasonal section that rotates periodically depending on how much space you have in your liquor store. Regardless of where you set up your seasonal items, remember these points:
- Use appropriate seasonal colors: Make sure your signage, table throws, and other visual items reflect the season or holiday. For example, consider using warm reds and oranges for fall or reds and pinks for Valentine’s Day.
- Know which holidays your customers care about: Use your POS system to find which holidays consistently lead to more sales and plan appropriately. In other words, there’s no point in spending time and effort on a display for a holiday your customers don’t celebrate.
- Set up complementary promotions and offers: Use your seasonal display area to highlight promotional items and discounts to encourage more foot traffic and sales. Also, include complementary items (like glassware or accessories) to encourage upselling.
Last, use your POS system to create product bundles for popular seasonal cocktails — think a piña colada set with rum, cream of coconut, pineapple juice, and a recipe card packaged together.
3. Create Informative and Eye-Catching Signage
Signage plays an important role in drawing a shopper’s attention to all the products available in your liquor store. According to a recent survey, over 75% of shoppers purchased because a sign or display caught their attention.
Using different colors in your liquor store signage is a great way to create consistent branding and highlight special sales and promotions. Specific colored tags (like a bright orange) are commonly used on shelves to highlight sale items.
You can also use signs and displays to show off your expertise. Many people visit an independent liquor store looking for recommendations, so consider making signs to highlight staff picks with tasting notes and potential food pairings.
Similarly, many in-store signs are used for what’s known in marketing as “storytelling.” These signs help form connections between a customer and a product that leads to a sale. For example, you could use a sign to show how a particular wine is made or tell the story behind a local craft brewer.
4. Highlight Local and Craft Businesses
A deep understanding of the local craft breweries, distilleries, and wineries can help set your business apart. Create sections for local offerings and educational signage to let people know what’s unique about each.
You could also arrange your coolers and wine sections to group local or craft products. This will help naturally guide people to unique local offerings as they browse.
Outside of liquor, you could partner with local supermarkets and food businesses to offer snacks at your store. Just make sure your POS system can handle the different tax rates and age-verification requirements for alcoholic and non-alcoholic products.
5. Try Laydown Wine Bins
Sometimes, the type of shelf you use is just as important as what’s on it.
Many liquor stores have well-thought-out wine sections, usually arranged by wine type, country, and region. Laydown wine racks help make a wine section look classy by prominently displaying labels.
Laydown wine bins are also ideal for displaying and storing higher-end wines. Not only is the display more attractive, but storing wines on their side is important to prevent the cork from drying out.
If you specialize in selling wine, laydown wine racks are a must for establishing your reputation as a knowledgeable wine seller.
6. Invest in High-End Liquor Cases
Offering popular, cheaper choices along with some high-end products is a great way to pique customer interest and upsell them. Consider putting your special selections in a lit glass case.
On a practical level, a locked glass case keeps your most valuable items safer from shoplifters and employee theft. However, an attractive case is also a great talking point. Even if a customer doesn’t have the cash to spend on an expensive bottle of whiskey, having a conversation about it with an employee may lead to a recommendation.
Related Read: Liquor Store Inventory: A Quick Beginner’s Guide
Make sure you don’t bury your case full of high-end bottles in the middle of an aisle or the back of the store. These are your best items; they should be on display and highly visible.
7. Experiment With Window Displays
The first step to making a sale is getting people to walk into your liquor store. Window display advertising should be colorful and capture a customer’s attention.
Window displays typically feature popular or trending products, but there are loads of creative ways to use them. To create a sense of urgency, feature your customer loyalty program and its perks or highlight any short-term sales or seasonal events.
Your window displays will give customers’ their first in-person impression of your store, so make sure to aim them at your target customer. Take note of your frequent customers and what they’re buying to get some ideas.
8. Delight Customers With Hand-Crafted Displays
Many customers prefer an independent package store because it provides a more curated, personalized experience. Using wood barrels, chalk signs, and other handcrafted elements to decorate your store can help lean into this feeling.
Try old oak barrels as display tables for new arrivals of whiskey or other barrel-aged spirits. Consider getting wooden aisle signs to help customers navigate the store.
Beyond looking nice, custom displays and signage give you a chance to establish your brand identity. Having some handcrafted signs gives customers the sense that you hand craft your selection as well.
Use Technology To Craft a Winning Liquor Store Merchandising Strategy
When crafting visual merchandising strategies for your liquor store, don’t discount your technology. A modern liquor POS system can support your marketing and store layout plans using a variety of data and actionable insights, such as:
- Bestsellers: Understand your bestselling products to create better signage, rearrange the store layout, choose which products to feature in window displays, and more.
- Peak hours and seasons: Analyze your transaction data to see your peak hours and seasons, and make sure you plan your store visuals accordingly.
- Inventory management: An accurate view of your inventory levels helps you figure out which stock is moving and which needs a little help from an attractive in-store display. Studying your inventory turnover rate can also help you adjust your store layout to steer customers toward underperforming items.
- Customer data: Look at the transaction history of loyalty members and frequent customers to understand which visual merchandising strategies are working — and which aren’t.
The most important aspect of any liquor store's visual merchandising plan is flexibility. Check in on what’s working and what isn’t, and don’t be afraid to change things up. Make sure to ask customers questions to see if there’s anything that does or doesn’t jump out to them.
Did they find what they needed? Did they know there was a sale on? Ultimately, visual merchandising aims to make the customer experience as easy as possible.
Bottle POS works with independent liquor and package stores throughout the country to help them manage the unique challenges of liquor retail.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Bottle POS gives you the tools to make smarter decisions about your business.
