Often positioned at the entrance or exit of a visitor attraction, your gift shop can command significant footfall. But to engage visitors – whether they are eagerly focused on the attraction ahead or heading home after a day of enjoyment – the shop must immediately grab attention to be a success.
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has been working with multi-disciplinary design agency 93FT on a refresh of its Victoria Plaza shop. Welcoming over 2.5 million visitors annually, the shop sits at the primary entrance to the gardens.
Having identified key product categories with significant potential for retail optimisation and sales growth, the project strategy was to apply a retrofit to the existing store design, enhancing some existing fittings and introducing new fixtures and fittings that worked to improve the customer’s retail experience.
Since the alterations, Kew has seen an increase in sales across several categories, including 2,500 more units of prints and postcards within a six-month period, which is a key part of the organisation’s retail offer.
Here 93FT’s Nick Clark-Hine shares five key takeaways from Kew’s shop upgrade and explains how to apply for a free mystery shopper to analyse your store.
Five Key Takeaways
1. Reflect your visitor attraction in the retail interior experience
Lean into your USP – why are people visiting? Not only does Kew’s shop have lots of beautiful books and products about gardening and botanicals, but the interiors also reflect the surrounding environment. Our team used natural materials and tones to create connection to the wider gardens. A calm, sage green colour covers the walls and encapsulates the plants and fauna outside. Meanwhile, oak tongue and groove panelling, and draped linen generate a soft, organic palette. Create a space that customers like to spend their time in.
2. Bespoke fittings for specific product categories
To maximise the impact of Kew’s diverse retail offer, we designed and manufactured a suite of flexible, free-standing joinery solutions tailored specifically to books, prints, and cards. By handling both the design concept and in-house workshop production, we guaranteed a high quality finish while ensuring every item can be merchandised to attract customers. This varied, tailored approach defines each product department cleanly, creating an intuitive shopping experience that guides customers and drives sales.
3. Enhance what you already have in retrofitting
Transforming a visitor experience doesn’t require starting from scratch. Retrofitting allows us to audit existing assets and adapt, upgrade, or reposition them for maximum impact. Working closely with Kew, we analysed their current fixtures, fittings, and furniture, identifying opportunities to optimise the spatial flow and elevate the retail aesthetic. A retrofit approach can deliver a solution that is sustainable and commercially savvy.
4. Design special fixtures and fittings for kids
With Kew attracting a varied demographic, it was essential to design an inclusive retail environment that engages younger visitors. We engineered bespoke, lower-level pick-up bins perfectly scaled for child-height accessibility. To complement this, we created a custom leaf motif applied via wall vinyls, seamlessly zoning the children’s department and creating an intuitive, visually playful destination within the shop.
5. Tell your customers where to find things
Clear spatial navigation is vital to a successful retail layout. We seamlessly integrated high-level signage directly into the bespoke joinery, ensuring maximum visibility from any point in the store. By creating clear visual cues, this integrated wayfinding naturally guides visitors toward the categories they are most interested in, increasing dwell time and directly encouraging the intent to browse and buy.
We find with many cultural and heritage organisations, simply elevating many of the elements already present in the shop can make a huge difference.
Head of Retail and eCommerce at Kew, Hannah Oxley said: “The store refit has been really well received by staff and customers, which was exactly what we wanted, a better shopping experience.”
Special Member Offer from 93FT
93FT specialises in helping organisations think creatively about their visitor experiences from concept to delivery. We work alongside retail and commercial teams to optimise their stores, elevate the visitor experience, and maximise commercial success. Our studio works across three core specialisms: branding, websites (including Shopify ecommerce) and interior design.
With over 20 years’ experience, we’ve helped organisations of all shapes and sizes take a holistic approach to their digital and physical retail and visitor engagement projects, helping to optimise and enhance the experience.
We are pleased to offer Association for Cultural Enterprises members a free “mystery shopper” review, through which a member of our design team will experience your shop first-hand and deliver a report outlining potential improvements.
Get in touch via our website or email nick.clark@93ft.com
Discover more about the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew project
