With autumn just around the corner, there are plenty of opportunities to freshen up your product displays and attract new customers. Visual merchandising is a successful technique to draw attention to your products, increase sales and make customers’ experiences more enjoyable.

Joe Baer, the cofounder, CEO and creator of ZenGenius, specializes in visual merchandising and creating great customer experiences. He recently shared some of his successful tips to mastering this skill.

Baer explained that the main goal of visual merchandising is to “maximize how you arrange and display the products and goods in your store,” the organization of the store and the flow. The organization of displays and products will influence a customer’s shopping experience. Creating an obvious flow of how people should walk through the store not only makes the shopping experience more efficient, but you can guide the customers to a product you want them to see – even a product that they didn’t know they needed.

“Every great visual merchandising program first has a visual strategy, a thought process behind your brand and how you want your store experience to work for the customers,” Baer said.

Besides visual strategy, some other things to consider when creating a visual merchandising program are any core or seasonal elements to include, marketing and graphics, lighting and technology and any merchandising standards.

When businesses prioritize visual merchandising, they can see a lot of benefits. The mood of a shop can be adjusted by conjuring positive energy among the team and customers and creating a more fun and calming space.

Additionally, visual merchandising can improve the sales of the company. When customers are enjoying their experience, they tend to perceive your products as higher value than if they were having a negative experience.

Genevieve R. Mills, the COO and director of Oakland Green Interiors, noted studies that show “people will pay 20% more for an item… if [they’re] buying it in a plant-filled space.” And, since the customers are enjoying their time, they spend longer in the store – which encourages more sales.

Baer said visual merchandisers’ main inspiration is nature. But how do businesses introduce elements of nature into their stores? Incorporating plants is one way. It won’t come as a shock that many people enjoy gardening or being around plants in their everyday lives, but have you ever wondered why? Mills is not only very educated on the topic of biophilia, but she is known as a biophilic expert.

Biophilia, as Mills described it, is “a Latin term that means love of life or living systems… the idea that [humans] have this intrinsic attraction to nature.” In fact, “for 95% of our evolutionary history we lived in nature. We lived in simple communities in the mountains, in the plains, in forests, near rivers…” so we are and always have been a part of nature.

Especially now that most of society lives and works in buildings, we have a desire to reconnect to nature however we can and “restore natural stimuli to our built environment.”

Studies have shown that when people are surrounded by nature – either actually in nature or just shown photos – there is a measurable shift in their nervous system. Mills explained scientists have been doing research on biophilia for about 40 years and observing measurable results. Some case studies show that the presence of nature can lower pulse rate by 6%, stress hormones by 15%, sympathetic activity by 19% and increase parasympathetic activity by 56%.

As you prepare your store design for the upcoming season, make sure to take some ideas from Mills. Incorporate nature in your space. Nature in the space is “the strongest way to get the biophilic response in a person,” she said. That includes incorporating plants, water or even animals into the built environment.

There are endless ways to use biophilic inspiration in visual merchandising. It all depends on what you have available, what kind of space you are working with and what you are hoping to evoke in your customers.

With the autumn season coming up, make sure to take advantage of your seasonal elements to draw your customers in.

by Kelsi Devolve