Gary
With winter upon us and Christmas just around the corner it may be time to consider how you can make the most of the season by maximising your retail opportunities and delivering a bigger and better shopping experience for your customers.
Shop extensions – Make your retail space larger
Marquee retail extensions are not only a viable way to generate additional retail space, they also provide a great opportunity to create an interesting, unique and immersive shopping experience for your visitors.
We recently provided a shop extension at RHS Garden, Wisley. The additional retail space was used to create a ‘Christmas wonderland‘, displaying all of the seasonal stock associated with the festive period. The marquee extended across the entire frontage of their existing shop and featured glass doors, a boarded and carpeted floor and an innovative heating system. The heating system was designed to keep the marquee warm even during the coldest periods and to ensure moisture was kept away from sales displays overnight.
The additional space was a success for the RHS with customers able to enjoy the freedom to browse and purchase a greater selection of festive goodies than would have been possible without the marquee.
Christmas dining – Create the space for extra covers
The manager of a pub from a well know chain recently asked us to provide a quotation for a marquee to cover their garden terrace.
The specification included wooden floor with carpets, heating and lighting, as well as an extended hire period of five weeks to cover Christmas and the early new year. We generated a quotation and plan for a marquee to extend from the rear doors of the pub, covering the entire terrace and creating seating space for an extra sixty covers.
For busy food retail establishments the numbers stack up. The additional dining space pays for itself and begins to turn a profit in a very short space of time. Establishments with limited dining space could see a huge return on investment with the use of a dining extension, plus it’s a unique an interesting space that even locals and regulars will be keen to explore.
Add value for your customers
There are plenty of untapped opportunities for creating additional retail space and although the extra income it can generate is important it doesn’t need to be viewed as a purely commercial opportunity, your customers may well thank you too. Take the example of a cafe extension we created for the RHS.
Despite the cold weather, plenty of visitors are still keen to explore the gardens at Wisley during the winter months. With Jack Frost in daily attendance, the cafe, which provides much needed respite in the form of hot beverages and food, would soon have hit capacity. The outside terrace, which provided plenty of Al Fresco dining space during the summer became a redundant space during the colder months – with the addition of a heated marquee to cover the space the RHS were able to offer visitors a much needed break from the cold before continuing their exploration of the garden’s beautiful winter floral displays.
If you would like to discuss ways that we can help you maximise your retail opportunities this winter, please contact our sales team on 01483 322070
