The world’s biggest retail trade fair, Euroshop, in Dusseldorf, took place last month, but what were the big store design trends businesses should be acting on?

The great and the good of store design headed to Euroshop last month to find out where they should be spending their budget over the next couple of years.

A total of 94,000 visitors headed for Dusseldorf, which given the coronavirus backdrop, was a very respectable outing for shopfitters’ Glastonbury.

But what was on show, and what does it tell us about the future of retail stores?

The digital shift

An “experiential vending machine” was meant to be the star attraction of Hall 13, where many of the larger shopfitting firms had set up.

Experiential vending machine Euroshop - Copy

But on closer inspection, this was in fact a touchscreen that enabled the user to call up and buy a programmed display of merchandise by entering the details of a payment card. The selected product would then be posted or delivered to the shopper’s chosen address.

All good perhaps; but the ‘experience’ in this instance turned out to be simply internet shopping using a mobile device or a laptop.

This was one of a number of examples of how in-store digital appears to have stalled. There was plenty of digital on show, but not much of it was targeting the shopper directly.

Instead, the efforts of those offering solutions were focussed on making shopping easier. The principal goal seemed to be payment, with seamless mobile payment a big focus.

Easier self-checkout was on view. Software specialist NCR’s terminal had a built-in camera to enable age verification via facial recognition while Diebold Nixdorf attracted attention with a self-service terminal that was capable of converting to a manned checkout, depending on shopper traffic.

Tim Greenhalgh, creative director at Fitch, who attended and exhibited at the show, said: “I think there is probably more digital in stores than ever before, but it’s no longer front and centre as the epitome of the offer. It’s there to assist and will be in front of the consumer when it needs to be, but that is it. It has a vital role to play, but not in the way that we have seen it operating in the past.”

On the food front, digital was also on hand to help and there was everything from EPTA’s fridges and chillers that use less energy, to ‘smart’ shopping trolleys from Wanzl that can assess everything put into them with the outcome displayed on an attached screen.

Chillers

Peter Ruis, chief executive of Anthropologie Europe, summed up the feelings of many: “The type of investment you are likely to make in whatever customer-facing digital you put in a store will be out of date in just a few months and that will make it worse than a bad shopfit.”

A time of digital change, therefore. Tech remains all around in retail environments. It will not, however, be quite so obvious to those who are shopping.

The urban store

German shopping trolley manufacturer Wanzl touched on an area that will be of interest to many retailers: the urban store.

Smart trolley - Copy

This is a solution that was being offered by several of those who had taken space at the show, from Umdasch to Itab, and involves fit-outs that enable large retailers to make credible and relevant offers using very limited footprints.

At Wanzl this translated as cashless stores where smartphones do all of the work and where limited replenishment products are the norm. The store on offer looked like a modern apartment with light/dark contrasts to create drama.

For Austrian shopfitter Umdasch, the message was experience, coupled with a modular approach to store systems. This means pieces of in-store equipment that can be transformed, for example, from a shelf to a table, offering a variety of presentation options.

Resurgent visual merchandising

As a counterpoint to the diminished role of customer-facing tech, one of the Euroshop highlights was visual merchandising including some very eye-catching mannequins, including a quasi-porn version of Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus cheek by jowl with a series of very athletic figures riding road bikes in an alarming state of undress or lifting weights. It was hard not to gawp.

Venus mannequin

Dutch producer Hans Boodt Mannequins stood out in a strong field principally owing to its investment in figures that made onlookers look twice, such was their life-like quality.

Hans Boodt had focused on “creating characters”, perhaps most scarily typified by a skinny-jeanned, dreadlocked figure in a raincoat staring at a mobile phone.

If this level of reality, not just in the appearance of mannequins but in what they are doing is picked up on by retailers, there will be little need for screens.

Price will, of course, be an issue, but it remains substantially cheaper to redress a static figure and to change a pose than to create new content that engages on a screen.

There were many ‘look at me’ exhibits, from shopping trolleys with the predictable screens that monitor progress through a shop, to chillers and fridges linked to the internet of things which alert retailers to when they need to be replenished.

But many of these seemed more to do with showing what can be done, rather than what retailers are likely to invest in.

Lighting that controls shopping behaviour

As in previous Euroshops, LED was ubiquitous and there was hardly a stand that wasn’t showing how important it is, both in terms of illumination and energy saving.

That said, much was made of lighting that can control specific shopper behaviours. For Philips this meant light being used to create zones and varying lighting levels, according to the products being displayed.

In grocery, time of day merchandising has been talked of for some years. Time-of-day lighting is about doing something of the kind, but effecting this using remote systems.

Trolleys Euroshop

This could also be seen and experienced at the Fagerhult stand where a walk-in lightbox meant that the interplay between light source and the material being lit could be felt and understood.

Almost all of the lighting companies had moved from LED and energy-saving – this was almost a given this time around – to controlling the nature of in-store experience using light sources of different colours, temperatures and intensity.

Sustainability takes root

The one thing that seemed to unite Euroshop this year was the drive to be green and indeed to be greener than thou.

A cynic might remark that this was all being done for no better reason than everybody else was doing it, but with the environment being high on the agenda of every exhibitor it was impossible to overlook – the logistical effort, build and lighting cost of every stand notwithstanding.

Sustainability, was a broad church, ranging from Umdasch’s liquid dispenser, a digital kiosk allowing shoppers to fill containers with different liquids, to display equipment created from sustainable materials, wood mostly.

The word ‘responsibility’ was being bandied about and there seemed little doubt that sustainability will still be on display at the next Euroshop in 2023.