There’s something about an approaching autumn that invites the idea of reinvention and renewal. It is the season, after all, of fresh starts, new binders and sharpened pencils. So why not revisit your retail interior with an eye for untried opportunities to generate new sales?

Herewith, five pro tips to guide your rebirth.

• Remember the physical realities of your consumer in your design. If you’re selling to petites, employ store fixtures that are respective of their height. If your store caters to plus-size customers, don’t have narrow aisles. If you want to attract kids, make sure your retail displays exploit their attraction to bright colours and sweet treats.
• Play up your threshold area. Also called “the decompression zone,” this is the open area just beyond your entrance that offers customers the first critical impression of what you’re about. The lighting, fixtures, colours and displays that mark this space tell shoppers lots about what they can expect of the experience shopping in your store.
• Encourage the shopping exercise. By designing their retail space and the display systems that populate it in such a way that facilitates browsing, a retailer increases the likelihood that shoppers will make purchases. If store fixtures and the pathways between them are accessible and easy to navigate, customers will not feel impeded in their impulse to cruise. Bear this adage in mind when mapping your plan: Where the eyes go, the feet will follow.
•  Respect your customers’ personal space. Consumer behaviour guru Paco Underhill introduced the notion of the “butt-brush effect.” This describes the distaste a typical customer, particularly a woman, has for those physical shopping scenarios in which her backside might potentially make contact with that of another shopper. As such, you’ll want to provide plenty of breathing room around your customers.
• Remember the research. A whack of studies reporting on shoppers’ natural tendencies offers an abundance of pseudo-scientific data to be capitalized on when laying out a store design. Take, for example, that the average person’s field of vision is around 170 degrees. Or, for another, the fact that 90 percent of consumers turn right upon entering a store.