Before we break down the case study analysis, you will need context.

Let’s start by discussing the teams that participate in the production of the Style Guide.

On the corporate side, you have the Executives, Directors, Merchants, Marketing, Visual Merchandising, and Creative Department. On the field side, you have the Regional Directors, Visual Merchandising Managers, Logistics and Store Operations.

Each team plays a distinct role, but success depends on one thing: alignment.

In the container of the executive end-to-end process, which takes place at the top of the chain, their finalized executive decisions containing business goals and visual brand guidelines, get trickled down to the Corporate Visual Merchandising teams, where executive strategies take on physical form in their in-house warehouse store.

Once, the Corporate Visual Merchandising teams receive the strategy, then, they synthesize the executive information, strategize by strategically placing product on the sales floors and finalize the in-store concepts to pass off to the Design team. The next step in the process is to partner up with the Creative Department.

This is where the Design team collaboration takes place, this is when both teams come together to pass off data, concepts, maps and goals, then the Design team starts building the Style Guides. Finally the in-house concepts get a home, with the aim to communicate product presentation, brand guidelines, product data, marketing, promotions, customer journey maps and product placement maps.

After both teams align on the concept and content for the seasonal strategy, the Design team fully takes over the Style Guide production.

This is when the Design team moves from partnering up with the Visual Merchandising team to full on design production mode using methods such as Design Thinking to guide the research, ideation and solutions.

Yes this step is about watering down the big ideas and information from executives in familiar concepts field visual merchandising teams are used to absorbing and working with but it’s also about putting the customer in the middle of every choice and decision.

The North Star guiding the design work is in investigating the pain points and realizing that the challenges are a symptom of a bigger problem that is being felt by both the Corporate Visual Merchandising team and the Field Visual Merchandising Managers.

In the Discovery process we uncovered that the challenges are directly linked to the problem the stores are facing when product arrives at their store location without corporate direction. This one problem is felt throughout all stores and is a universal challenge felt by stores worldwide creating friction within all teams, and making it difficult to have empathy and or understanding for each other’s workload.

The lack of empathy comes from not understanding the processes that take place outside a specific workload process because they haven’t had exposure or clarity around it, which makes it difficult to understand each other’s responsibilities therefore, the in-store execution suffers hurting business goals.

We discovered that one of the reasons why the pain points are so intense is because the corporate teams have never worked in the stores before. Therefore, do not understand the challenges, planning and process that goes before executing the Style Guide’s direction to roll out a new product. This naturally creates unrealistic expectations on both sides of the teams. The lack of clarity is a symptom of a lack of empathy making leadership on both ends suffer.

The impact I brought to the table was felt all across, especially when I constantly had to remind teams on both sides that the entire point of the end-to-end process is that it is all for the customer. The point of the Style Guide is for the customer, to create an exceptional customer experience, not just to sell the product, as a designer on the team I do not just focus on the product, I focus on designing a customer experience.

And this is the juxtaposition of my dual experience of having worked on the field for almost a decade leading visual merchandising teams spatial planning and executing psychological processes to strategically place products  by getting in the mind of the customer to maximize sales and loyalty. Alongside my UX/UI background comes in handy because I'm able to communicate to both teams and act as a bridge for connection.

We will explore some of the challenges we discovered. Part of designing a simple easy to read Style Guide comes from inspecting archived Style Guides, methods previously used, physical store architectural structures, store layouts, maps, feedback and research.

Using frameworks, feedback and processes to communicate business and visual strategy goals to stores worldwide.

The purpose of the Style Guide is to provide field management teams with direction and a step-by-step process on how to execute the in-store environment for their store. These visual strategies are created in-house by the visual corporate teams after the final executive decisions are made. It provides stores with the information they need to plan, prepare, and deliver a consistent, immersive, and emotionally engaging in-store experience for customers.