Visual merchandising consultant Karl McKeever has some simple but crucial advice for maximising retail potential in gun shops

As the creative director of visual merchandising consultancy Visual Thinking, Karl McKeever has worked with retail giants such as Tesco, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis. Recently, through GMK’s Target Project scheme to increase retail sales of the Beretta product group, he has turned his eye on the gun trade. He told Gun Trade News his impressions of the trade and what gun shops should be doing but aren’t – both to improve layout and presentation, and to increase sales

THE PROJECT WE RAN with GMK was with their field sales team. The idea behind the project was to equip them with a range of knowledge and skills in store presentation and branding, so they could provide better support to the retailers.

We started with a three-day workshop where we trained them in a range of best practices. We gave them some assignments to get out into the marketplace and test out their new knowledge and skills on a number of case-study examples. We then brought those back for a second workshop where we reviewed progress.

It wasn’t just from a visual perspective – part of those assignments was very clearly to find hard results through performance improvement, increased sales or category uplift. The balance between the two goals was very much 50/50.

Before the project I had very little experience of the gun trade. At the start of the project, we went out and visited several outlets to get an idea of what their presentation was like, to give us a ‘start point’ for the training and development.

I think my first impressions need to be put into context. Unlike, say, a company store where you have more control of their product range, these products were going into independent businesses – people with a much leaner investment scenario. The consequence of that is that these kinds of business reminded me of what the independent sports trade and independent bookshops were like 15 or 20 years ago – pretty unsophisticated, with a lot of scope for improvement. The range of products they stocked was often disorganised – a real ‘rag bag’ of mixed ranges, which makes it much more challenging in terms of presentation.

In the Target Project scheme, what we wanted to do was make sure any Beretta products – and I’m talking less about the guns and more about the clothing, accessories and so on – were together, to create a ‘shop-in-shop’ environment. We had to get the guys to focus on the strengths of the product, draw together strong and credible range categories as far as they could with the ranges they had, and within that apply a range of simple but effective visual merchandising techniques.

What we also got the field sales team to think about was whether there was potential to reposition their departments within shops – in other words, work with the retailer, making a few recommendations to improve position, improve the use of equipment and maximise the potential of a display.

Some of the advice I’d have for the trade in general goes back almost to first principles. I was genuinely quite surprised at some gun shops’ lack of modern thinking – it was obvious when a store was run by hobbyists with a lot of product knowledge but not much retail knowledge.

Retailers need to get out and have a look what’s happening on the high street generally. That will open their eyes to the gap between the state of their own businesses and comparable ones in other marketplaces. Going back to the comparison with independent sports shops, 15 or 20 years ago those businesses were pretty untidy and lacked the mainstream retail thinking they now have. Then the big names in the business – Adidas, Nike and so on – set the bar so high in terms of their own branding that it sent a clear message to the retailers that they had to improve.

That is the kind of message we are looking to get GMK to communicate, albeit in a more palatable form – the message that there will be some serious threats in future. This is particularly the case in areas such as lifestyle clothing, which are a prime target for someone to trump the retailers with an online offer. From that perspective, everyone who sells clothing or lifestyle products within a shooting outlet should be concerned. And that concern should be that they deliver the best possible customer experience, so that customers buy from them instead of going online.

The customer wants a good shopping experience. The products are not inexpensive, and therefore they should be presented in a way that shows off their features and represents the price points they are offered at.

Taking Beretta as an example, if you look at their lifestyle products, in many ways their range is not dissimilar to the range that Ralph Lauren, for example, might sell. When you go into a Ralph Lauren store, it actually looks like a premium product – it looks expensive, it looks stylish and above all it looks great quality. In my experience of going into independent gunshops, the products just looked tired and unloved.

So what can retailers do? Simply, they can tidy up their shops. Implement some rigorous housekeeping programmes, and within that look for some best practices. They should practice clear product segmentation – put their brands together, and as far as possible, within brands group the merchandise by category. If there are a range of products that are designed for a specific function or need, they should try to present those together to give the customer an idea of what those products are all about.

Beyond that, they should look at some simple retail disciplines. Make sure that products are tidy, that they are in premium condition, that all unnecessary packaging is removed. In other words, treat your shop like a shop, not a stockroom that happens to be on the shop floor. It’s a harsh criticism, but that’s what I found retailers to be like in some cases.

There will be more retail developments from the scheme with GMK and Beretta later in the year – watch this space for details.

This article was published in the February issue of Gun Trade News.