Showrooms are still super busy and those investing in displays are doing it right. They focus on making the showroom brand their own and featuring more products displayed based on style — not by manufacturers. 

New showroom designs are cleaner, brighter and well-planned. While these designs are beautiful, I would like to see more personality in the displays based on geography, local culture and community.

Recently, I was lucky enough to visit a spot with tons of great local food and had a few moments to explore. It was great — all the restaurants fit the local scene. The décor, the lighting, the music, and the overall vibe made sense for the market; they were hyperlocal in that every sense helped immerse you in that community. 

While it was not elegant dining by any stretch of the imagination, it was some of the best food I have had in years. If you travel at all, you know that Nashville doesn’t feel like Bourbon St. and is different than Seattle or Austin in vibe — every place has its own colors, sounds, smells and character.

Hyperlocal is a feeling that must be well-planned and can be accomplished in a showroom. It is curated art, displays and colors used in a showroom to make it feel as if it is part of the local community. I have only seen this in our industry occasionally in the hundreds of showrooms I have visited over the years. Usually, it is done with antiques, props and local artisans helping with the look.

For example, it makes sense that consumers use more nautical-themed products in their homes along the coasts, right? And while the products sold often would pair well with nautical accessories, it is rare to see that in the showroom environment in a tasteful way. 

Keep in mind that what I’m stressing here is tasteful. I was recently in a northern town visiting a restaurant with beautiful paintings by local artists on the walls. QR codes drove customers to artists’ Etsy sites. The art fit the market in price and style and helped make the total experience work. 

Even the music in the restaurants I visited fit the experience — the right songs, the right volume, the right feel. No, it was not a single speaker driven from someone’s desktop computer — it was a balanced sound system with equal volume throughout the environment.

Show Some Personality

So why isn’t hyperlocal common in the decorative showroom world? I am sure some owners are reading this and thinking they just dropped a bundle on a showroom design company that went with a color theme and a look likened to an Apple store — clean, polished and full of displays. 

But the truth is, when you visit this type of showroom, it is just like Applebee’s — you could be in Anchorage, Alaska, or New Orleans and you would not be able to tell the difference. The microwaved broccoli is the same. 

I urge you to give your showroom some personality. I have mentioned before that the millennial consumer wants to have a selfie moment if they are taking the time to do the in-store experience, and 57 percent of showroom customers are millennials. Rarely do I see vignettes or displays that are comprehensive, hyperlocal and selfie-worthy.

The usual excuse is that everyone is too busy and dealing with supply-chain challenges, staffing shortages, etc. Once business slows down, I am sure another excuse will get whipped up. 

In the meantime, the national competitors will continue to pull business away, and those independent showrooms claiming they are different will keep losing traction.

Keeping Track of Displays

While business is good, we should all look at our displays’ quality and make changes based on trends. While I feel that the COVID-19 pandemic slowed some of the speed at which trends change, now is the time to freshen up and use the summer to give your showroom some newer, higher-standard displays.

As we change out showroom products, I would like to address accounting practices for material we keep as displays on the showroom floor. Here are a few different ways I have seen it done: 

1. Invoice it out at zero when it goes on the floor. This is clean and keeps everything in real-time, but we lose visibility of what is on the floor, and it negatively impacts the profit-and-loss statement immediately. 

Personally, I think this is the best option and makes the showroom owner think before pulling the trigger on new displays. It makes you negotiate harder for a program from the vendor as well. Depending on your system, it also can be easy to track what you paid for the items and pick the profit back up when the displays are eventually sold off.

2. Keep all material on a tag-and-hold ticket. The positive spin is you do not lose visibility to product; the impact on the financials is when you sell something off the floor. The negative is that it becomes challenging to manage and your inventory carrying costs are inflated. 

While this is much easier to keep products alive to sell, I would argue that if it shows in inventory, the expectation is that the product isn’t a display — unless clearly noted in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

3. Keep all products on the balance sheet as assets. The positives and negatives are very similar to method No. 2, but tracking becomes imperative since you usually only validate the balance-sheet items annually; it could get expensive. This method is too much work for most showrooms to handle.

I guess it would depend on the system you are using, but I still lean on option No. 1 for the most impact. Plenty of items will sit on the sales floor for years; having them sitting around at full cost makes it harder to throw them away when the time comes.

Ensuring displays are done right in both an aesthetic and accounting sense are showroom best practices. Try to innovate and be creative in your approach to getting attention with your vignettes, and make sure you do your homework to keep them tracked in your ERP system the right way for your business.