Homebase, B&Q and Wickes are all suffering falling sales, but perhaps a little more project-based merchandising might help.

Homebase, B&Q and Wickes are all suffering falling sales, but perhaps a little more project-based merchandising might help.

Kingfisher updates on trading for the past three months this week with most onlookers expecting another small decline in sales following the 5.2% like-for-like decline in sales that the company suffered in 2012. If this does indeed prove to be the case, a lot of the blame will no doubt be placed at the door of the weather. In case you’ve missed it, it’s been wet and it’s also been cold.

And received DIY wisdom has it that whenever we have a long Bank Holiday weekend, like the one we’ve just come through, many of us like to head for the nearest DIY store to pick up on that project we’d started, ahem, some time ago. Unless it’s chilly or wet, or both, at which point we flee the country or hole up in front of the telly.

There might however be another couple of reasons. The market for DIY sales is dependent, to a degree, on people moving house and undertaking ill-advised tasks and equally, on the ability of DIY retailer to inspire us. The latter is important as DIY is one of the more obvious arenas in which cross-category merchandising really ought to work.

‘Buying a spade Sir? Well perhaps we can interest you in a shed so that you can look after some of those young plants before you bed them in’, or something like that. There are in fact numerous examples in the average DIY shed, think B&Q, Homebase, Wickes and suchlike, where if a shopper heads out to buy one item, the possibility exists that an incremental sale may be made with some deft cross-merchandising.

Yet the fact is that most DIY stores are locked into category layouts with spades in one area, sheds in another and plants in yet another still. If you’ve lucky, they may actually be contained within a catch-all space known as “Gardens”, but the chances are just as good that this may not be the case.

It does seem odd that at a time when this sector is under fire that, with the exception of Kingfisher Wunderkind Screwfix, more is not done in some of these very large stores to merchandise on a DIY project basis. This is the basis of lifestyle merchandising in a fashion store and it works.

There are, of course, plenty of leaflets in these stores telling you how to plumb in a basin, lay a floor, or plaster a wall, but when it comes to looking at the broader project picture, inspiration remains a little thin on the ground.