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Jessica Terry, Senior Manager Visual Merchandising & Store Design at Molton Brown Global tells us how IWD becomes a lifeblood for her team.
"Before implementing the IWD software, we used to create all planograms and visual proposals on Photoshop, which was often time-consuming, inaccurate and unprofessional. Our stores and partners had to use generic planograms and apply them to their own space, which left room for local interpretation causing compliance and governance issues.
We also had to physically carry out all leadership sign offs either in our small mock shop in head office or in one of our central London stores. As you can imagine, this was an inconvenient and costly process.
It was a large job to set up the IWD software, as we have a vast and varied catalogue of products, graphics, props and fixtures. Thankfully, the IWD team provided exceptional training and took the time to carefully guide us through the entire process. Overall, the IWD team were more than happy to respond to our business needs and helped us solve complicated requests.
Throughout the set up, we learned a lot about our own catalogue and during integration we realised what best practices we needed to develop, such as naming and code conventions within our database. One member of our team is a now a super user who manages the software and guides the rest of the team.
Since launching, we can now create bespoke planograms for all standalone and new international stores. This process has improved compliance and has been more efficient in terms of training. We can now take store managers through each space in a virtual walkthrough on Microsoft Teams, which has improved time-management and reduced travel costs.
We are also using the 3D tool to improve partner buy-in for new spaces and new store concepts, which has cohesively brought together our Store Design and Visual Merchandising teams.
Implementing the software also coincided with the increase of remote working during the Covid 19 pandemic. The software has therefore been beneficial for the business as we can create a ‘Virtual Mock Shop’ to remotely sign off merchandising strategies and graphic executions. Plus, we use this tool for internal sell in of NPD and corresponding merchandising strategies, as well as Senior Leadership updates.
Many of our Molton Brown team members have provided great feedback on the output of the software and have dubbed it a ‘game changer’. In the future, we look forward to using the data analysis function to visually show how are planograms are driving sales and to influence range planning.”
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