Among retail stores, craft stores face a unique set of challenges because of the wide array of products they tend to carry. The craft industry covers diverse hobbies ranging from knitting and sewing to scrapbooking and card making, to creating jewelry, apparel, and art. It also tends to encapsulate seasonal and even year-round home decorating.
In other words, craft stores have a lot of stuff to organize, and this can pose major logistical challenges. Whereas an apparel store may need a few different types of racks, bins, and wall and counter displays, a craft store requires display spaces suitable for everything from needles and spools of thread to decorative trees. How can you keep it all organized and easy to find? Here are a few essential fixtures and supplies every craft store should have.
Gondola Shelving
No craft store can do without versatile gondola shelving, which allows for endless adjustments thanks to double-sided functionality and pegboard backing to add customized shelving, hooks, bins, and other display accessories. No matter what items you need to display, gondola shelving will accommodate, and you have the option to change it up frequently as inventory and seasonal displays demand.
Bins
Gondolas are a great place to start when it comes to planning the layout of your craft store, but the devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and you can’t just throw everything on shelves willy-nilly and expect it to stay organized. You also need a variety of bins to separate items on shelving.
These could be large or small, depending on what you put in them, and you could even include dump bins here and there for clearance items that aren’t worth the labor to organize. Planning ahead, including taking measurements of shelving and item packaging, will help to ensure that you order the right size bins for your needs.
Signage
Layout is extremely important in a craft store because there is such an abundance of goods. You want to try to make finding craft items intuitive, which is why you place needles and thread by bolts of fabric, or why glue and markers are near scrapbooking paper and albums, for example.
Still, shoppers will need some direction to find the right area of your massive store and quickly get to the items they’re seeking. This is where signage comes into play, and it’s important that you have plenty of it.
You can start with hanging signs to direct traffic immediately to certain areas of the store, then attach signage to endcaps to direct shoppers walking down aisles. From there, make sure to place pricing and sale information on shelving as needed.
In Conclusion
With versatile shelving solutions, a myriad of bins to organize displays, and plenty of signage to direct shoppers, you’ll have everything you need to create a clean, attractive, and intuitive retail space in your craft store.
But, it's not always an intuitive choice on which fixtures you need. Even more complex is finding a fixture supplier you can trust to help you make the right choices for your store. In one of our recent guides, we lay it all out – 5 tips for choosing the best fixture supplier if you're looking for value and quality.
When it comes to finding the “right display” for a wide variety of craft merchandise, nothing is more effective than a custom display. At S-CUBE, our end-to-end solution lets us deliver high quality store fixtures and retail solutions on time and on budget for retail chains of all sizes and brands nationwide for over 35 years. We’re just only a phone call away, contact us to get started today!