An Insider Look at the Process Every Custom Retail Fixture and Display Must Go Through.

At Canada’s Best Store Fixtures, we’re known for our custom work.

After all, we’ve created a one-stop shop where retailers can come for everything from retail environment design, to fixture and display manufacturing, to installation and general contracting work.

In past posts, we’ve shared insider tips on how to find the right retail fixture for your store, but an often overlooked and misunderstood part of the custom fixture and display design/build process is the prototyping phase. That is to say, the actual design/build process itself.

In this post, we share a behind-the-scenes look at the process.

We sit down with Bud Morris, our President and Owner to talk about why prototyping is such a key step, and one that’s easy to get wrong.

BM: Prototyping is an extremely important part of our business and quite honestly one that I see as a differentiator.

Interviewer: Why is that?

BM: (laughing) Because most of our competition, I know for a fact, hate it and I will tell you quite honestly, most of our internal people within these four walls hate it too because it’s a bit of a grind and there’s a lot of pieces and parts to it. 

Generally speaking, when a retailer comes to us with an idea there’s not a lot of detail shared. Or, not enough detail to go straight to manufacturing. So it’s our job to take the thought or idea or dream and turn it into a reality.

So we’ve gotten really good at asking the right questions and pulling the right answers and packaging that all together – so we can hand it over to manufacturing and have them fabricate what we interpret our retailers need, even if they don’t have all the details figured out.

Interviewer: So most retailers have a vision, a rough sense of what they want, and then you figure out what that is, the best materials, way to build it, looks, costs, installation, shipping, all of the details?

BM: 100% yeah. So here’s a real example I have one on my desk right now. One of our national retailers wants a live goods area where they can feature and sell plants.

Okay, so I’ll just talk you through this. Our client gave us an idea of what it should generally look like – which included a reference to a project we did at one of our grocery clients.

And while the grocery example worked for grocery, the reality of it is, if I make this live good display all out of wood and laminate, and their staff is going to water all these plants, this display is only going to last three months. It’s going to look like garbage and the retailer is going to hate us.

Interviewer: Because of staining, swelling, dirt, and all that stuff?

BM: Exactly. So the other thing is they have a budget of $50k, which I look at and say, “that’s a reasonable budget. I should be able to do something with that.” 

Well, again, if we start going down this road where we can’t use wood, what are our other options?  Metal?  Aluminum?  Composite? But we still wanted it to look like wood… if you’re not careful you end up scoping this project to tick all the boxes, but it’s not going to be $50k anymore. It’s going to be way more.

It’s easy to go all the way down this road – with the best of intentions – but spend hours and hours, and days and weeks and at the end of it say to the retailer, “Okay, here it is. And it’s $100k”.

What are they going to say? They don’t have $100k for this project.

So we’re forced to start over and nobody wants to do that and in the end, you’ve lost everything, right?

So it’s a very meticulous and precarious process. I mean, you have to have the right people in the room. You have to have a full understanding of what the needs and the wants of the retailer are and then have all of the options that you know may be available to help them succeed. And it may not be what they think they want. But you have to have that ability, that well-roundedness, that depth to be able to offer different solutions.

And I think that’s why honestly, most people hate it.

Interviewer: When most people think of prototyping, they think of making miniature versions of stuff.  Do you do that?

BM: A lot of people think of that but no, we don’t build small versions of anything. When we’re prototyping, we’re prototyping a real-life-sized object so we can get a sense of size, scale, and eyelines… how it’ll be constructed, and loaded into the building, installed… there’s a lot to it.

So one of the things that’s a big deal is weight restrictions, right? How much weight can I put on?  How much am I hanging on it? Am I climbing on it?  

I remember back to my early days with a national pharmacy. We used to build our shelves out of 16-gauge metal and the cost of metal was going up and up. And so, the client comes to us and says, “Listen, we can’t keep taking these constant increases. How do we reduce the cost of the shelves?” Well, we can lighten the gauge.

So we go from 16-gauge metal to 20 for the shelf.  And we go through this process to weight test the shelves at 20-gauge. We ask, how much the shelf needs to hold?  We determine that industry-standard in grocery, which is probably the most demanding retailer, is 500 pounds safely.  500 pounds a shelf is the number.

We go through this whole process. We show the client the testing and the loading information. Going from 16 to 20 will save you X amount of money. We get the go-ahead.

And I remember, we made the change and I got a call. They say the shelves are all crumpling.  

What do you mean the shelves are all crumpling?

Anyways, so what was happening was, and this was something that they had done for years and years building stores… the installers would stand up on all the gondola aisles. Start bringing in merchandise. And line the aisles with skids full of merchandise so they could offload them and start putting goods on shelves.

In that process, what would happen is the aisles become full of skids. So for years, people would walk on the shelves around all the merchandise. And when it was 16-gauge metal it didn’t matter, but now we have 20-gauge shelves and they were never built to be walked on… it’s meant to hold deodorant and toothpaste, not installers.

Interviewer: So what did you do?

BM: I told them we could go back to 16-gauge at the higher price or your team can stop walking on them.  So, they stopped walking on them.

But also, while gondola is not built to climb on, it’s a reality that people climb on it. Not everyone is going to get a ladder. They step on the base, they step on the second shelf, and sometimes they step on the third shelf they climb it like a ladder. And just because they’re not supposed to do that, doesn’t excuse retailers from the island falling over and killing someone.

We’ve got to keep everything in mind.

But it’s also things like, what is the volume expectation out of this unit as well? If I’m prototyping one unit, and I’m ultimately going to build five of them in the entire run, we’re not going to put as much thought into the production aspects of it as we would something that has 1000 units.

Ultimately it’s about creating the most functional fixture. And that means it’ll hit budgets, it’ll hit longevity, it can actually be loaded in or shipped cost-effectively, and actually assembled on site.

Interviewer: So if this is a precarious part of the process where a lot of things could go wrong, what’s the alternative? It seems to me there’s no choice but for a manufacturer to be good at this.

BM: You’d think that’s the case, but I’m shocked at what other people get away with. Listen, I can only really speak for what we do here at CBSF but I know what others do. What they do is they end up pushing back.  They push back the responsibility and the blame on their customers. It’s a, “You tell me what you want me to build and I’ll build it for you. And I’ll charge you by the hour for whatever it is and that’s how much it’s gonna cost you and if you don’t like it, then you redraw it and I’ll rebuild it. Just tell me what to build again.”

That’s their version of a prototype shop, which is not my version of a prototype shop.

Interviewer: And of course, the main problem with this is the retailer doesn’t know what they don’t know.

BM: Exactly. If you’re not working with the right people, you’re just leaving it up to luck. It becomes a blame game and it’s not really a healthy relationship.  It’s not a creative, healthy partnership at all.

Maybe it’s just me personally, but it just doesn’t seem like the right way to go about building out a lasting relationship.

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