Sustainability in Retail - New Year, New Opportunities.
The new year brings fresh opportunities for the retail industry, but one priority remains more important than ever — sustainability.
According to the British Retail Consortium, the UK retail sector’s carbon footprint is equivalent to 215 million metric tonnes of CO2 – the annual emissions of 47 million cars, which is more than there are in the UK in total.
This isn't just a scary statistic; it's a call to action. Cleaner air benefits both the planet and our health.
Major drivers of the sector’s emissions output include transportation and logistics, store operations, such as heating, cooling, and lighting, and supply chain activities, including the shipment of goods and the removal of waste.
It causes a ripple effect. Higher footfall means more people journeying to and from stores to shop, likely in their own vehicles, and more people shopping means more stock that needs maintaining. While all the measures listed are designed to improve in-store experience and drive traffic to the stores, they ultimately make the supply chain busier — generating increased emissions as a result.
But there aren’t any bad guys in this story. Instead, there’s just the interplay between supply and demand. More demand means higher supply, and as both go up, so too do the sector’s emissions.
The good news? 3D visualisation offers a sustainable solution to the problem, helping retailers to pre-test shelf layouts virtually and gather real consumer feedback online.
This is where “Interactive Planogram” technology for shelf pre-testing comes in.
It takes a lot of effort for manufacturers to get a pack design right and make it stand out on the shelf. Getting it wrong is detrimental, as packaging that’s poorly designed can mean lost sales and retailers having to strip down and change shelf layouts across dozens, or even hundreds, of stores. It’s time-consuming and ultimately wasteful when goods that aren’t sold end up going to landfill.
Pre-testing involves evaluating shelf layouts virtually before they even reach the real world. Physical testing, often limited to a single prototype store or a 'shopper lab,' tends to take longer and can delay time-to-market for new shelf configurations.
Visualising store shelves in 3D with software such as ours – using digital assets that are all built automatically at high speed, in just a few minutes, from data instead of by hand – is a game changer. When coupled with a user-friendly web-based front-end that’s linked to a consumer survey, it allows many different combinations to be tested quickly with real consumers online — all at an accuracy rate of 92%, which is comparable to real world shopping.
A good 3D interactive planogram pre-testing strategy not only saves time and improves sustainability, it’s pivotal to helping stores decide on the best shelf layouts faster, maximising sales whilst minimising waste. Now that’s a major win.