A friend of mine from Bulgaria is an architect. When he was in university, he always use to send me his assignment to look over.

What I noticed with his drawings was, unlike other architectural drawing I had seen with just lines and boxes, he drew complete buildings.

What I mean by this is, he drew the buildings as if they were already occupied. If it was a house, he will show people sleeping in the rooms, eating in the dining room or watching television in the sitting room.

When I asked him why he drew completed builds, he responded that these days, architecture was about functionality.

He said the buildings has to be designed taking into account what it is being designed for.

Design functionality is the way of organizing space for it's optimal use, predicting future changes or allowing flexibility of organisation to accommodate different usage patterns in the future.

Increasing your store sales requires you take into account your store design and visual merchandise display.

To his credit, Tesco CEO said Tesco is refurbishing its stores to meet customers demand.

When Sir Terry asked the question who do we serve, the answer he got was Tesco serve the ordinary Joe.

Tesco serve the working person.

The person who wants to sneak into a retail store at launch time grab his lunch or dash to the supermarket after work to do his grocery shopping.

Because Sir Terry understood the type of customers he was serving, he increased the numbers of checkout counters in Tesco stores to reduce the queues at the checkout and speed up to payment process.

Basically he designed Tesco stores to accommodate his customers.

That is called designing for functionality.

This is a very critical point for your store design.

In most instances, when retailers want to design their stores, they put out tender for shopfitters and construction companies and they chose the cheapest.

Good store design is not about knocking together a few shelves and furniture's. The core of store design is designing your retail store for functionality…a store that appeals to your target market.

Good store design is not about how beautiful the store look, it is about:

• How the store appeals to shoppers as they walk pass
• How easy it will be for them to navigate the store once they are inside: walk
• through the ales, find what they are looking for, get assistant, reach products
• How easy will it be of them to make payment and exist the store
• The mechanism that are in the design to trigger automatic upsell
• That is what is considered designing a functional retail store.

I will use Harrods, early learning centre and toy r us as examples of design functionality.

Harrods children department is spacious for children to be able to sample the toys in the store.

They even have play consultants whose only job is to play with children to get them acquainted with toys.

Imagine the play consultant playing with toys with kids…the kids are enjoying it and laughing, do you think they will want to go home without those toys?

Contrast that with Early Learning Centre store design. Early Learning Centre also sells children toys and stuff.

But unlike Harrods where there are play consultant and there is enough room for the children to sample the toys, Early Learning Centre stores are like old soviet dental suite.

Children in the store cannot even turn without bumping into something.

Toys R Us is another toy retailer with stores that are cluster like soviet dental suite.

At present they are making profit on the back of the success of products like Lego.

But supermarket and online retailers are beginning to eat into their probability.

Its profit margin has already declined this year despite the success of the Lego movies and the numerous Disney movies.

The reason for this is: Toys R Us, Early Learning Centre and retailers like them do not understand that they are in the experience business.

If any of those retailer ever have a dispute with Lego or Disney, it game over for them, they are out of business.

Kids don't go to their stores because of the stores, they go there because of the products.

Remember shoppers buy the experience of buying the product not the product itself.

So the first step to increasing your store sales is to design your store with your customer in mind.

Designing your store for functionality starts with customer flow.

Customer flow refers to the ease with which customers walk through the aisles; the many ways in which they gain access to products, sample products, have their questions answered and the ease with which they pay for products and exit the store.

A good customer flow system should respond to customer's choice.

They should have visible options that include easy access to products and customer service that results in positive impression of your store.

There are different types of store design, the most popular of which are:

• Free flow design
• Grid pattern design
• Spine design