Tips for Successfully Merchandising Glazed Pottery
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with many of our customers to develop merchandising tips and techniques for selling our unique flower pots. While retailers just getting started with pottery may need to experiment with the pointers below to find the mix that best suits their clientele, all of the following suggestions have resulted in successful sell-throughs in multiple different settings.
Take the time to visit any Wal-Mart, Home Depot or Lowe’s location to see examples of exactly the wrong ways to merchandise pottery.
Perhaps the single most important concept to understand is that quality glazed pottery is NOT a commodity item, and that you need to place it in your store accordingly. You purchased our products because you could see the difference between them and the collections shown in big-box national retailers — your customers need to be able to see the pots and to hold the pots in order to make the same judgments.
When it is well-displayed, our pottery will make a bold and beautiful statement in frontal displays and high traffic flow areas. It will almost always prove worthy of this valuable real estate in sales dollars. Think about it: you can sell a $3.00 box of fertilizer to every 5th customer who walks by a high traffic display, or you can sell a $30.00 flower pots to every 15th customer. Please note that this only applies to higher-end pottery; terra cotta and plastic pots (and even basic glazed pottery like that found at the boxes) will tend to look like items that haven’t been shelved yet.
The Secret to Successful Displays:
The real trick to making pottery sell well is in displaying it correctly. It should always be kept clean of soil and dust buildup. Pots should not be stacked too high, as this format is very hard to shop (and potentially dangerous to the little old lady trying to get a pot down).
Often a “nesting” effect — a pot inside another matching, larger pot and slightly raised so the customer can see both pots — is very attractive (an easy way to achieve this effect is to use pvc pipe cut to varying lengths to support the smaller pots). The display should be close to the ground, so nothing falls a great distance in case of an accident, but not on the ground, as this looks cluttered. Low, wide tables, usually with two to three levels, work well.
Your customers will interact with the pots, and will often handle several of them before making a final decision. You want to encourage this process, even through it will mean that the pottery department needs to be occasionally tidied
The grouping of the pots is important as well. We suggest grouping pots by color scheme — all the green tones here, all the blues on this table, etc. This allows pots of various sizes to be displayed together, which makes for more visually appealing displays. Also, it is easy to help a customer narrow down what they want and make a decision with this set-up. Just ask the simple question, “What colors can work in that location (or with that plant)?”
There are other ways to group them — by size, by material, etc. Experiment, but remember that if the display looks good, then the product becomes more than a hard goods item. This is the key to making it a successful pottery department.