HOW TO CREATE A DANCE FLOOR AND WHY.

A dance floor is space at the front of your shop between the front door, your destination traffic locations and the counter.

The dance floor is an open space you can reconfigure at ease for short promotions or major seasons, a space people can walk around and through – a space people can walk either side of as they enter the shop. It should not contain any permanent fixtures. Ideally, it will have feature lighting you can re-focus.

Every retail business needs a dance floor.

Here is a photo from the design papers for one of our corporate stores from 2009. We set a dance floor for the business from the outset. The dance floor in this configuration is the brown floor area you can see from the entrance to just over a third of the space in:

While it is easy creating a dance floor in a shop you are building from scratch, it is considerably harder to create this space in an existing business with old-school fixtures with set in their ways team members and customers. 

Here are our tips for creating a dance floor: 

1. Map the floor layout in a broad sense – i.e not too much detail.
2. On the map, draw the main customer traffic flow from the door in to a destination, to the counter and out. This will usually be a triangle.
3. Look at what fixtures exist in this space and border this space.
4. What can you move to create a bigger and more valuable dance floor?
5. The newspaper stand is usually one item. This can be located deeper into the store and it can be allocated considerably less space than is usual.
6. Magazine fixtures or at the vey lease a magazine power end will be another item. This can either be eliminated or pushed back.
7. Spinners are often in this space – but they rarely drive the return you need.
8. Clear the space.
9. Any fixture on the dance floor must be moveable.
10. Remember, the product is the hero, not what it is sitting on.
11. Your dance floor pitch must tell a story – all products must relate to one common theme than makes sense not only to you but to your shoppers.
12. Create your first deliberate dance floor offer. Focus on a specific theme.
13. Run a dance floor promotion for a week, maybe two – but no longer.
14. Change is vital to the dance floor. It needs to keep moving, like dancing!
15. Plan ahead so everyone knows the plan.

Don’t overthink your moves. Sometimes, any change is good as it disrupts and disruption causes people to notice things in the shop they have otherwise missed.

You do not always have to stick with tradition either. For example, during a major season such as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, your dance floor could pitch items not for the season.

If you are not sure what to do or how you are going, email help@newsxpress.com.au with photos.