Tag Archives: retail

Museum Retail: Small display – Big impact

User research,

Banksy book display

One of the focus areas for improvement at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) and M Shed is our retail offer. Over the past year Zak Mensah (Head of Transformation) and Helen Lewis (Retail Manager), with input from Peter Holloway (retail consultant)  and myself (User Researcher), have implemented a  number of big and small changes in order increase income generation in our shops but to also make them more appealing, relevant, and exciting parts of the museums.

This post is about a small but seemingly effective change we have recently made within the shop at BMAG. It follows the Phase One refurbishment of the shop in October 2015. The shop refurb included the purchase of seven new nesting tables; one of which we have designated to display products outside the entrance of the shop. Here I look at what impact this small change has had.

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We began using the shop-front display table on the 11th December 2015, and we have been surprised with the positive impact it has had on sales. The display is dedicated entirely to a range of books about Banksy – the world renowned Bristol-born graffiti artist. We know from sales data that the Banksy books are an important product within the BMAG shop. To date in 2015-16 the book Banksy’s Bristol: Home Sweet Home by Steve Wright is our fourth most popular product, and overall it is the most popular book that we sell. If you’re interested, it is now also available through our online shop.

Following the general retail rule of putting the most popular items forefront and centre of the shop, Helen displayed the Banksy books on the shop-front display table.  In total we stock four books dedicated to the work of Banksy:

  • Banksy’s Bristol: Home Sweet Home – £14.00
  • Banksy: Myths and Legends – £5.95
  • Banksy: Wall and Piece – £14.99
  • Planet Banksy – 12.49

It wasn’t until the table was in place that we realised how much of a natural fit the Banksy book display was. Directly outside the shop is BMAG’s very own piece of original artwork by Banksy – Paint Pot Angel. The iconic piece was given to the museum by Banksy following the hugely successful exhibition/takeover of Banksy’s artwork in the museum in 2009 – Banksy versus Bristol Museum. The display table is in the eye-line of the Paint Pot Angel and it’s the perfect moment to capture visitor’s interest in Banksy, and ultimately to generate sales of Banksy related products.

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What’s been the impact on sales?

Between 2nd May 2015 and the 30th December 2015 we have sold  a total of 205 Banksy books at BMAG. (Our retail sales records for this year  excludes April, it begins in May 2015 as this is when we moved to Shopify).

Period One – without shop-front display table

  • Prior to the 11th December (223 days) 163 books were sold
  • Average of 0.73 books sold per day

Period Two– with shop-front display table

  • From 11-30th December (excluding 25/26th Dec) (18 days) 42 books were sold
  • Average of 2.3 books sold per day
In tBanksy book charthe period we have displayed the Banksy books on the shop-front table, there has been an increase in sales of 219.8%

To some extent these figures may be inflated by the Christmas sales, but there are other notably busy periods within the period between May and December so it is likely that this increase in sales cannot be attributed to Christmas alone.

The lessons of this small change it seems is that it can be good to experiment with change in museum retail, especially if you use the  available evidence you have to inform those changes. The Banksy books are  also a great example of the need to provide visitors with products that are relevant to their experience of the museum – they respond well to them.

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On a regular basis I will see visitors come into the museum, go straight to Banksy’s Paint Pot Angel, take a photo of it and leave. There are only nine pieces of Banksy’s artwork remaining in Bristol, two of which are displayed in our collections – the Paint Pot Angel at BMAG and the Grim Reaper at M Shed. The two that we display are the only ones displayed in-doors and so we have a great opportunity to provide the Banksy books and other merchandise that fans of Banksy want. As I noted above, we already knew that our Banksy products were popular; even before the shop-front display of the books, the Banksy products were already in our top-ten most popular products. So the big lesson is that when looking to increase income generation it is a good to start with popular items and ask whether they could do better still.

Using Shopify to run an affordable museum shop till system (POS)

Digital services,

Photo of Shopify till - iPad, till and printer first use

Across the service we typically take payments for our two major retail shops and  ‘paid for’ exhibitions at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and M Shed. To date we have never set the tills up to give us useful reporting beyond the “groups of products” e.g. ‘books’ or ‘cards’ which is simply not good enough [no shots].  We need useful data to help us understand our business and improve our service. GDS refer to ‘designing with data‘ in their design principles and I see no reason not to be the same across the museums, especially with trading and IT retail systems.

During 2015-16 we will design our retail offer based on good usable data about our visitors, product ranges and sector trends.

Introducing Shopify Point of Sale (POS)

In the not too distant past I used to do freelance web projects and shopify would regularly appear on my radar. It is an affordable (from $9 a month) web shop that recently introduced the ability to run as a till system called Shopify POS. Due to its popularity with web folk I trust, our desire to get a move on and its feature set to cost ratio, I figure we have nothing to lose but try it out – we have no historic data either so anything is better than our current position.

Also, we’re an Arts Council England lead for digital so what better problem to solve than affordable till systems to kick off our 2015-18 partnership?

We will use Shopify POS to:

  • Take cash and card payments
  • Manage our products and stock level
  • Provide both retail and service management with regular performance reports
  • Act as a mininum viable service to help plan for the future
  • Dip our toe in the water with an online shop offer (both POS and web shop are interelated making it easy to do)

Getting started

I made a “management” decision to switch POS and so this is an enforced project for the retail team who have understood my reasoning are behind the project. I have said that we have nothing to lose but this may not work and i’ll hold my hands up if we fail. We had a call with the Shopify team and knew we needed some new kit:

  • Two paid instances of Shopify POS – one for each retail shop. I am disappointed there is to no way to have multiple shops from one account even if it was a discounted upgrade. This will enable us to report accurately each shop as its own business
  • iPad air 2 with Shopify (use the 7 day trial first) with retail add-on and reporting ($59 per month)
  • Bluetooth barcode reader, till drawer and receipt printer from uk reseller POS hardware for approx. £250 ex Vat (turns out you can use any drawer though as they are standard
  • Reuse existing card reader (approx £20 per month)
  • iPad secure stand
  • Router to avoid public wifi and maintain security – fitted by IT services

First steps

  1. Test a proof of concept – Zahid and Tom did a stand up job of getting the system to play nice with our infrastructure and i can’t thank them enough as this proved to be a pain for an unknown reason on our network.
  2. Once we had our test ‘alpha’ system working, we confirmed that IT were happy for us to proceed. They generally like projects that they don’t have to get involved in too much! As we’re using the existing corporate contract for our card payments which never touch Shopify there isn’t a security risk at that point AND it doesn’t touch our finance system. Essentially Shopify is “off” the network and at worse we expose our reporting and products – secure passwords for staff is the biggest challenge!
  3. Add our MANY products. Our retail and admin team are working on this at the moment
  4. ‘Beta’ Test over the week of 27th April alongside the existing system with our retail manager Helen who is critical to the success of the project
  5. Show the retail team how to use the system and get their feedback – after all they need to use and champion the project and service

Next steps

Assuming staff are happy and we’re getting the data we need I plan to put the service into ‘live’ starting 1st May so we can get 11 months usable data. We’ll be sharing our progress on the blog. PLEASE get in touch if you have anything to help us make a better service or have any questions.

A full shop till system for unless than £1000 a year…..let’s see!