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OSHAWA SAJE

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When my manager moved to a new location, she asked me to come and do a complete overhaul on the merchandising at her new store. I was given complete creative control (which was beyond exciting) and was able to source new materials and props from local HomeSense locations. My main objective was to beautify the store by unifying colour palettes on tables, cleaning up and organizing the shelves (to address over-crowding), removing sold out product from open shelves (and placing them out of sight), as well as filling in empty gaps with signage or additional products.

Most if not all Saje locations have since changed their store layouts - organizing their products by performance (ie: headache, pain, sleep, hormone, immune, etc), which includes new signage above each shelf (eliminating the oversized glass jars). The day I spent re-merchandising this location was shortly before everything was changed over to the new design.

*note* image of store front taken from google

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FRONT ENTRANCE + TABLES

The front entrance of each store is slightly different - at my own location we had 3 hexagonal shaped wooden trunks, here they had tall wooden blocks (which were a lot easier to merchandise). I wanted to focus on creating a cohesive colour palette (in this case whites and soft greys) right when you walked in to draw your eye inside. When it came to the tables I wanted to draw your eye around the display - which I achieved through the use of colour, signage, plants, and height variety. In addition to looking beautiful and organized, I wanted these displays to tell a story - which meant including complimentary items that could be layered together. Storage was tight at this location which meant getting creative using space beneath the tables - you can see from the before and after that neatening up the boxes and creating a uniform appearance helped draw your attention to the items on the table rather than the objects beneath it.

SHELVES

This location was almost twice the size of the one I was used to which meant LOTS of shelf space. At the time we were selling through a lot of product because of the fast approaching holiday season, which meant hiding testers (for unavailable products) and instead replacing them with other items that could be layered together. Similar to the tables it was my goal to tell a story with each shelf - which meant including signage (to support the message) as well as pulling items from other sections. Many of our clients had favourite items, which would bring them back to the same section over and over again with each visit. I thought that by incorporating items from other areas of the store that were then layered with their favourites, they would discover new products to try and then add these to their own collection.

This location was also unique in that two of the four walls were glass which backed onto the mall - meaning that the shelves had to look gorgeous from both front and back. Initially they had been merchandised to have product facing the client within the store, as well as having additional product at the back of the shelf facing out to the clients passing by. I personally found this to be too cluttered and with the glass being tinted you couldn't read the labels of the products anyways - so I made the executive decision to clean up the shelves by only having product facing clients shopping within the store. The result was a display that looked tighter, more uniform, and more appealing to look at.

Spending the day in a new location, with one of my favourite managers, merchandising the store was one of my fondest memories of working with Saje. Creating displays, pulling together palettes, and organizing are all within my genius zone and bring me so much joy, can you tell?

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