Does store layout actually change what people buy?
(Yes, it does)
A friend of mine who sells rather beautiful handbags redesigned her Knightsbridge store last year, she changed nothing about the staff or the stock, but instead simply rearranged the order clients encountered pieces when they walked in.
Higher-margin sales went up about twenty percent.
She told me about it over lunch as though she'd personally invented retail. "Paul, I literally just moved things around." Yes darling, that's decision architecture, Thaler and Sunstein built an entire field around the observation that the way options are arranged changes what people choose, while the person choosing almost never notices it's happening.
She'd put the expensive bags where clients saw them first, which meant everything afterwards got evaluated relative to those. It's called anchoring, and it works whether you're standing in Knightsbridge or browsing on your phone at midnight in your PJ's.
Most luxury brands understand this instinctively in a physical space. A good showroom puts the hero piece where you can't miss it, controls the sequence, lets the environment do half the selling before the salesperson has even opened their mouth.
But online they abandon every single one of those principles and instead present forty-seven variations of the same bag in a configurator that lets you customise the leather, the hardware, the lining, and the monogramming, as though giving someone more decisions is the same thing as giving them a better experience.
It isn't BTW. To me that has always felt like just too much hard work.
The entire promise of luxury is that someone has already done the thinking for you, that's rather the point of paying what you're paying.
The brands that understand this online do something quite simple, they pre-select. They show you a considered starting point, the version they'd recommend, and let you adjust from there.
It's called the default effect, and the research on it is genuinely robust. A thoughtfully chosen default says "we know what we're doing and we think this is the one."
Forty-seven options in a dropdown says "we haven't the faintest idea, you sort it out."
One of those is a showroom. The other is nothing more than a stockroom.
Chat to you next week
Paul
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