How a mezzanine floor can maximise your retail space

Gain more valuable workspace with new flooring

Times are hard across the board at the moment, no more so than in the world of retail. Rising costs of everything from energy to imports mean that retail businesses are having to work even harder to entice customers and increase profits.

Luckily by adding a mezzanine floor to your retail space you can maximise your space and give your business a real, tangible boost.

There are all sorts of ways in which a mezzanine floor can help you to make the absolute most of your space.

Making the most of unused space

The majority of retail spaces are big and airy with very high ceilings. Although these high ceilings help to make a shop feel spacious, they also end up wasting a lot of vertical space. The shop floor takes up just a small fraction of the space available, and the rest is unreachable and so remains unused.

With the addition of a mezzanine floor, you can reach that unreachable space and turn it into more valuable shop floor space. Mezzanine floors are also designed in such a way that you can keep that airy, open feel whilst also using your space in a much more efficient way by utilising that all-important, and so often ignored, vertical space.

Avoiding relocation

Maybe business is booming and you want to expand into a bigger space. Or perhaps you have lots of new and exciting stock you want to display, but not enough room to display it. Relocating to a new, bigger retail space might seem like the obvious solution.

However, relocating comes with a whole host of expenses and complications. From the stress of finding new premises to the relocation costs and increased outgoing costs as soon as you move, moving into a new retail unit can be a real nightmare. As well as all the admin and expense, moving your retail business risks losing loyal customers.

Thankfully relocation is not the only option when you need to expand. Adding a mezzanine floor means you can almost double your floor space without compromising on location or adding all the associated costs of moving.

Creating more space for more stock

Of course, the real benefit of adding a mezzanine floor and creating more space isn’t the increase in space at all, it’s the increase in stock you can sell from your retail space. By adding a mezzanine floor you can reshuffle the layout of your space and create space for a lot more stock, whether that’s on the shop floor or in storage space.

Allowing room to browse

Another way in which a mezzanine floor allows you to make the most of your retail space is by allowing more space for people to browse and enjoy their shopping experience. Studies have shown that shoppers spend more when they don’t feel crowded or rushed. By creating more space you can leave more room between displays, making your customers more comfortable so they can take their time and ultimately spend more in your shop.

Eye-catching displays

The addition of a mezzanine floor gives the invaluable opportunity to easily create instantly eye-catching displays. By displaying products or promotional materials on the edge of your mezzanine, you make sure that they are visible as soon as a customer steps through your doors, or even from the street outside!

Having your displays raised up above the shop floor allows them not only to be seen immediately as someone enters the shop but also makes them visible from almost anywhere on the shop floor. Having your promotions and highlighted products so prominently displayed to your customers makes them much more likely to successfully entice people to buy them.

Separating out departments

Separating out different departments within your retail space is a really effective way of improving the flow of your shop and making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Adding a mezzanine floor means you can very easily separate departments from each other. This can be done by simply having one department upstairs and one downstairs, or by creating enough space to let you leave room between multiple departments on each floor, depending on your requirements.

Creating office space

A growing business often means a growing team and more work going on behind the scenes. Having office space in the same building as your retail space can be absolutely invaluable, allowing management and administration staff to move effortlessly between the office and the shop floor. Having your office on-site also allows you to monitor the day-to-day goings on in your shop much more closely and efficiently than trying to manage things remotely.

Of course, not every retail space has the luxury of office space, but with a mezzanine level, you can quite literally make space for it.

Providing storage space

Similarly to the above section on office space, having your stockroom in the same building as your shop floor makes a huge difference to overall efficiency in retail. Being able to just duck through a door to retrieve restocks of products rather than having to rely on deliveries from remote warehouses and stockrooms means you can have peace of mind that you won’t be left high and dry.

By adding a mezzanine floor to your retail space you can afford to make some of that new space simply storage space. Whether that’s a whole new stockroom or an expansion of your current storage capacity, it can make a huge difference.

Making space for refreshments

A possible use of your new mezzanine floor is the addition of a café or refreshment area. This can make a huge difference to the amount of time your customers spend in your space, and therefore the amount of money they spend.

Having a café area in your retail space will attract a whole new type of customer, bringing people through the door who may never otherwise have come in. A café is also a social space and a place for people to sit and relax, leaving your potential customers in a great mood and ready to browse your products.

A café is also a great way of generating a new income stream, whether that’s by running the cafe yourself or renting out the space to a self-sufficient company.

If a café isn’t a feasible option for your space, just having a seating area for people to be able to sit down and rest for a while could make a big impact on how long people will spend in your shop, and therefore how much they spend.

Enticing new customers

We’ve already mentioned a few ways in which adding a mezzanine floor could entice new customers to your shop. Creating space for more stock, a more comfortable environment, better displays or even a cafe or seating area are all great ways to attract more customers and get some new attention.

The act of installing a mezzanine floor in itself could also be a great new way of generating some excitement around your business. It has all the buzz of a new shop opening without the risks of relocation, and will bring customers back through the doors to check out your new and improved space.

Improving organisation

Adding a mezzanine floor is a great way to help yourself get organised. The increased space means decisions have to be made about what to fill it with and how, to quite literally take stock and reorganise your products.

Improving the way you organise your stock can make a huge difference to overall efficiency, both for your staff and your customers. For your staff, it can make restocking a smoother process and pointing people in the right direction for particular products a breeze. For your customers, it can make the shopping experience simpler and easier and can avoid people leaving without finding what they were looking for.

Adding value to your premises

If you own your retail premises, adding a mezzanine floor can add a huge amount of value to the building. Suddenly you have a space with multiple levels and potentially double the square footage of available floor space. Unsurprisingly, that can have a very big impact on the resale value of your premises.

Flexibility

One of the great things about installing a mezzanine floor in your retail space is that they are fully flexible, both in terms of the design and installation and also because of the fact that they can be easily disassembled and removed.

Mezzanine floors can be designed to fit in seamlessly with the aesthetic of your space so that it feels absolutely part of the fabric of the building. They can also be made to create a new floor which is the same size as the ground floor, or can be smaller to leave some open vertical space, depending on your requirements.

Mezzanine floors can also be dismantled and removed without any damage to the building. They are designed to be fully self supporting structures, so you could put up a mezzanine floor in a rented space and rest assured that it wouldn’t leave a trace if and when the time comes to pack up and leave.

For more information on how a mezzanine floor could help your business, get in touch with our team of experts at Racking and Shelving today.