Effective Merchandising of Decorative Hardware

by Clark Hieeins Director of SilEs and Marketine Ajax Hardware Division of Scovill

9 isn't a solo effort. It is a cooperative partnership between the lumber dealer or home center retailer, manufacturer and distributor.

A recent incident points up that if all three aren't working together towards an effective merchandising program, sales are going to suffer. We received a complaint from an eastern lumberyard chain that our decorative cabinet hardware merchandiser was not providing sufficient turns of product.

At the first opportunity, I visited one of their stores to discover that their housekeeping efforts were suffering from neglect. One of the bins in the merchandiser contained a cup of coffee that looked like it had been there for a month. Cigarette butts and other forms of garbage were present in some of the other bins.

Nothing slows down the sale of a product more than a shabby looking merchandiser. The display in the example should never have been allowed to deteriorate to that point. It is the responsibility of the store manager and his distributor to maintain the merchandiser in a clean, attractive fashion once it has been installed. The manufacturer must also make available a unit that is durable and can be easily cleaned or refurbished, which we did in this instance.

Besides continual housekeeping of merchandisers, it is also important that products be presented in the appropriate areas of the store. Do not treat cabinet and decorative bath hardware as nut and bolt type items. These surface pieces should be grouped with other decorative materials such as wallpaper and tiles-not with saws and screwdrivers. The placement should be as convenient as possible so the homeowner interested in decorating can do one-step shopping.

Know your trade and respond accordingly with the type of merchandise that will move. For example, in considering the sale of decorative bath hardware when dealing with the consumers interested in more utilitarian items. don't put in top-of-the-line pieces. Your assortment in this case should include some chrome-finished items that are oriented to the lower end of the price scale. Likewise, if you are dealing primarily with upper middle class customers, decorative hardware in antique finishes should predominate. Don't overallocate space. With our many different product lines and finishes, we can offer well over 24 feet each of bath and cabinet hardware items. But as a store owner or manager, you can't be everything to everybody or your turns will be severely reduced. Yet, you must have minimum selections or you will lose potential sales. For example, it is not enough to carry only towel bars. You also need towel rings and tissue holders to capture the bath redecorating market.

Maintain a consistency in appearance for your store. Aside from basic cleanliness and neatness, choice of merchandisers is extremely important. From our experience, the best type of displays for cabinet hardware are those that fit in with a standard store gondola. It is better to strive for some degree of overall uniformity rather than having a lot of manufacturers providing many different freestanding merchandisers.

On bath items, a manufacturersupplied merchandiser can be equally effective especially when used as an end cap. For this, we offer a 4' unit that contains only the fastest-moving items from our two top-of-the-line bath groupings. Ajax also makes available a styrene plan-o-gram with header board and metal hooks that permits a total of six different product combinations, each two feet wide which can be mounted on an existing gondola. This program aids in establishing a continuity ofappearance for a store.

Merchandisers should help organize your customers' thinking. Our Super Bin for cabinet hardware is designed in vertical color-coded family groupings so the shopper can easily spot the type of styling he or she is seeking. Faster-moving items probably should be located at eye level with the slower items below.

Use the take-one pieces supplied by manufacturers, for they are valuable sales tools. Not only should this literature illustrate the products in detail, but it should also feature image-of-environment photos that show the customer how the various items will look in the home. Decorative hardware enhances the appearance and value of the home and should be featured in the most attractive manner possible. Needless to say, the header must be an attention-grabber.

Products should be visible to the customer. The customer should be able to both see and feel the oroduct. and packaging can facititate these aims. Our bath items are either skin-packed or shadow-boxed so the product can be seen without any damage to the package. lf a box needs to be opened for a clear view. it can become mutilated and result in the loss of sales. Our cabinet hardware is poly-bagged for low-cost packaging and a sample of the product is mounted on the front of each bin.

Continually upgrade your merchandise. Anything decorative involves an aspect offashion. Ifyou don't update your merchandise, you will diminish your turns because you won't have what people are looking for to complement the style in their homes.

We annually introduce an aver- age of three new lines in either cabinet and bath hardware which should replace the groupings going out of style. We then provide an attractive corrugated Bargain Bin to help close-out slower-selling items.

Natural finished wood is becoming a very popular item. so we are taking advantage of the trend by bringing out a wood/brass line in the near future. If retailers just stayed with basic antique brass or chrome hardware and ignored this new move towards wood, a large segment of new business might be missed.

Stick to a reorder point that is consistent with size of purchases made by your customers. Too many retailers wait for a bin of cabinet hardware to sell down to 5 or less items before reordering. By doing this, sales can be lost because a customer won't have enough pieces to remodel. To avoid this problem, we provide 40 items in the initial stocking of our cabinet hardware and expect a reorder point to be set by the distibutor at a minimum of 20.

Displays must be self-explanatory. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure each item includes an explanation of how the product is used and stepby-step installation procedures complete with illustrations. The retailer should select programs that offer this type of packaging so they will be most helpful to their customers. With the rapid increases in (Please turn to page 58)

M00ERll bin merchandiser in action at National Lumber, Long Beach, Ca. This 16' Alax Super Bin merchandiser has individual bins that sit on shelving hung lrom pegboard, oflering flexibility lor the retailer combined with a good selection and strong visual presentati0n lo the cust0mer.

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