28 | Orgill Case Study At the same time, it had been at least 20 years since the interior and exterior of the building had been updated or since the merchandising and floor layout had been changed. Signage and fixtures were antiquated. There was also no main power aisle suitable for mass displays or other promotional areas. A reset would give the team an opportunity to improve traffic flow and accentuate the store’s existing dominant categories while strengthening core departments. As the store design team began to map out the new store layout, their plans changed dramatically. Germantown Hardware sits in a shopping complex. Prior to the acquisition, this complex also included an adjoining pool supply store and a car wash. Originally, CNRG was operating under the idea that they would only be able to utilize the space occupied at the time by Germantown Hardware. However, with the Wagners owning the entire property, CNRG was eventually able to secure the space occupied by both the car wash and the pool supply store. While this offered more opportunity to expand assortments and categories at Germantown Hardware, it also created the need to quickly adjust the plans for nearly every area. The final design increased the salesfloor space from the store’s original 14,694-square-foot salesfloor to 23,220 square feet, plus space for a 10,000-square-foot garden center, a 3,000-square-foot shipping and receiving area and a second floor “observation area” with office space overlooking the entire store. The final total footprint of the store is now nearly 42,000 square feet, a 75% increase from before the remodel. Building the Blueprint The store design team worked in conjunction with assortment planners to devise a blueprint to overhaul the store’s department layout, category adjacencies and traffic flow. The goals of both the physical changes to the building and the store’s new layout were to maximize exposure to key departments and create more promotional areas, such as endcaps and stackouts, while also creating a more open shopping environment with easier access to key areas. Since the building would be going through major construction, including removing dividing walls between the former separate businesses (the pool supply store and car wash), project planners were able to take a very holistic approach to how the new building would function. While not as accommodating as building a store from the ground up, having access to the entire facility did present some opportunities for large-scale changes. In many ways, the store design team were able to change the current facility to fit their plans, according to Walker. “We relocated the entrances and created a construction plan tomatch our merchandise plan,” he says. “That was a bit of a luxury compared to what we might normally have to work with in a store remodel.” The relocated entrance helped to divide the salesfloor into two areas. Hardlines departments sit to the left of the primary entrance. To the right are open display areas for patio furniture, grills and gondola shelving for lawn and garden. A power aisle running down the middle offers a line of endcaps and other promotional displays, such as stackouts and dump bins. On the hardlines side of the business, one of the major layout changes called for moving the paint department to the front of the store, making it one of the first areas After - Paint Counter
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