Bray Solutions – Building your business a pallet at a time

Walk into any Starbucks store, and when you get to the counter, you’ll be greeted by a barista asking for your name on your coffee of choice. It’s a huge corporate way of making every customer feel unique and creating a personalised in-store experience.

It’s not just this though. Take most retailers who, in their larger stores, have iPads that they can order specific items in for customers either to homes or to the shop floor. Yet another example of a great in-store experience that makes the customer feel valued.

WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT?

Brick and mortar stores are becoming less of a browsing location and more of a retail experience. Customers want something they can’t get online in a store and having an experience over just browsing is a key winner here.

TAKE WIT (WHATEVER IT TAKES) AS A PRIME EXAMPLE.

Starting out as an online platform, they built a flagship store in 2017 hosting a full spec of training gear for those who need more than your Sports Direct can offer. Weightlifting, CrossFit and strength athletes across the board are now able to find highly sought after specialist items in a retail space. But it doesn’t end there.

If you were to walk into the WIT store expecting a traditional retail experience, you’d be wrong. Soon enough you’d hear the crash of barbells landing and gym music blaring from downstairs.

It provides their target audience with the perfect retail space with the added bonus of a fully functioning CrossFit affiliate gym below. Located in St Pauls, London, they’ve placed themselves in the heart of the 25-35 high disposable income audience. It’s the perfect combination of location with product.

In a 2019 interview with Morning Chalk Up, Dan Williams, Co-Founder of WIT said: “From a retail perspective, our vision from the outset was to give the training consumer a curated multi-brand product selection that we think they deserve and we thought where better to do it than a retail setting but with a training space underneath.”

KEEPING IT TRADITIONAL

Or what about your traditional builders yard?

The perfect example of a brick and mortar store that offers a retail experience. Builders yards are growing and business is booming. They offer a personalised experience, for larger items you have to go up to the counter and ask for someone to pick it up for you.

You can order in specific items and most now have kitchen or bathroom showrooms that you can tour, almost a try before you buy. It’s a classic and traditional retail experience that is often overlooked in these situations.

Often located in warehouse spaces and retail parks with on-site parking and large spaces, the environment, location and target market all link up to provide both trade and consumer with the perfect experience.

HOW BRAY HELPS WITH THIS

In order to achieve an experience while shopping you need a wide variety of items out with often less than average storage and fast fulfilment times.

Having regular deliveries and large offsite storage is required in these kinds of flagship stores that offer more than a regular shop. It means you can offer a full suite of specialist products without the customer needing to look anywhere else.

At Bray, we have a 99.8% pick accuracy plus we are hoping to increase our storage space by 50%, on top of the expansions we had last year. We are more than able to handle the fast turnaround times, the need for a variety of storage options and more.