Practice English Speaking&Listening with: MockShop revolutionises Bonmarche's retail processes

Bonmarche is a women's wear retailer. We have over 330 stores in the UK.

We lean more towards 50-plus but we don't specialise in that.

We want to make women feel fabulous whatever their size, whatever their style, whatever their shape.

Visual merchandising is what the customer sees. From the moment she walks

into one of our stores, it is the visual representation of what we're giving to

her and that is really paramount to how we sell our goods to our customer.

We had a very traditional VM process it was fairly long-winded. We spent a lot of

time working through producing catalogs and vm briefs using photographs and

Excel-based modeling so we were looking at technology that speeded up that

process but also improved our compliance out in stores. Five years ago it was very

much this is the product to put it on the shop floor and now we're really

trying to you know refine the brand image look at what we give to the

customers and making sure she has that experience in the stores that is unified

so if she goes in one store and goes down the road she's finding the same

thing in the same places. MockShop's been really really key for us and really

been supportive in our journey in visual merchandising at Bonmarche.

MockShop gives us a really good visual as to colour balance, shape balance, range

balance everything that we would want to tick a box in from our range planning

processes. From what I would say "cradle to grave," so from the very concept to the

end of the product deliverance to the consumer in stores MockShop gives us

that cohesion in terms of how we represent that to consumer.

MockShop has just been really great helping the team to create a 3d

visualisation of what the project will look like in-store. The level of accuracy

has improved because they are not copying information from one system to

another it's all linked to the system.

Prior to using this tool we would get into a room we would have some racking and

we would rack it up. What the MockShop tool does is it gives us more structure.

You can load your fixturing in, you can load your product in. So we can do several

scenarios in terms of what does that look like in store A versus store B.

Prior to that it was a one-size-fits-all which doesn't really work in retail today.

The single biggest benefit of using MockShop is the visual

merchandising briefs. Creating them more easily, for not just individual stores

but for the cluster grades. We can easily maintain them and update them and if

product changes happen, say if the weather changes dramatically, we can

more easily update the briefs and send them out to specific cluster grades.

The training process was actually really beneficial. To have the full

knowledge of everything that MockShop and Visual Retailing can do was great.

It's a combination of workbook & hands-on which is really good and given us a

chance to have a go and then being talked through certain sections.

The from Visual Retailing are great. Whenever we need some additional

support, they come in they work around us and our time tables to do that.

The long-term impact from our point of view is more sales.

So more commerciality, more people putting things in the right places at

the right time, and us being able to dictate and be more reactive to that.

Ultimately, obviously, what we want to do is get more customers through the door

and have her like what she sees and for me MockShop from Visual Retailing play a

big part of that and I think they will too as we go along as well.