iHome Holiday Retail Floor

Case Study: iHome Holiday Retail Floor

Display Program

iHome Location: National Retail Floor Program Role: Creative Director Category: Retail Merchandising / JC Penney Point of Purchase Display Launch: 2012

The Brief

iHome needed a freestanding floor display that could hold an entire holiday assortment, headphones in five finishes, wired and Bluetooth speakers, and a full accessory wall, without looking like a discount bin that wandered in from the wrong aisle. The unit had to read as a gift, not a clearance rack, while still doing the unglamorous work of housing forty plus SKUs in a footprint retailers would actually approve.

The Work

I directed the creative and product architecture of the unit end to end:

• Structuring a four tier shelving system with a domed header graphic, so the display reads as one gift shaped silhouette from across the store rather than a stack of shelves

• Integrating holiday lifestyle photography, the Santa hat, the wrapped gift box, into the header art to signal season and occasion before a shopper reads a single word of copy

• Building product hierarchy by category and price point across the tiers, earbuds and MP3 accessories up top, headphones in the middle rows, speakers at the base, so the eye travels the way a hand actually shops

  
  

• Running “MP3 & Bluetooth & Speakers” as a vertical wayfinding column on both side panels, doing double duty as category signage and structural branding visible from either angle of approach

  
  

• Directing the unit’s engineering to retailer floor plan specifications, load bearing shelving, shipping tolerances, assembly time, the parts of retail design nobody photographs for the portfolio but every buyer asks about first

The Translation

A display like this lives or dies in the loading dock long before it reaches the sales floor. Buyers do not approve a display because it is beautiful. They approve it because it assembles in under fifteen minutes, survives a pallet jack, and still looks like the rendering once three stockroom employees have had their way with it. Design for retail is design for entropy. You are not just building a gift shaped object, you are building the version of that object that survives contact with a Tuesday overnight shift.

The Outcome

The result placed iHome’s full holiday assortment on the floor as a single branded destination rather than a scattered SKU list, giving the retailer one unit to merchandise and the shopper one obvious stop for every gift on their list. Get the architecture right, and the display does the selling before a single associate says a word.

Case study prepared by Delanie West, MBA — Founding Principal, Be Super Creative