Keeping it Fresh for Sennheiser’s Unique Wireless Audio Technologies

Every retail project has its own definition of success. Delivering that success is always at the heart of our design and engineering process. But we also try to go further by helping customers achieve more with their merchandising dollars. There are three main ways we do this.

1. First, finding new and better ways to tell brand and product stories and improve the shopper experience.
2. Second, making it easier to setup instore, reducing both set time and costs.
3. Third, finding creative ways to increase the effective life of the unit. This means making it more durable, and easier to repair and refresh with new products and stories. Sometimes called “future-proofing, this is something that can dramatically increase customer ROI while reducing waste and inventory.

A Perfect Example of Number Three at Work
A few years back we designed a display for Sennheiser (see photo above) featuring its innovative line of CX True Wireless earbuds and active noise cancelling wireless earphones in BestBuy Canada stores. The whole thing is cleverly designed to make changing product stories, product count, product types and repairs fast and easy.

Here’s hot it works.

First the backlit fabric graphic is easy to remove and replace. This is vitally important because Canada requires three different language versions for each graphic – English only, French only and English and French.

On top of that, the display makes repairs and product changes possible without taking the display apart. If you look at the photo above you’ll see six individual acrylic product displays sitting on the base – three pedestals for earphones, three boxes for earbuds. Each of these – in essence – is its own own mini-product display that magnetically attaches to the base below and the electrical connections inside it. This means repairs and updates can happen at several different levels of cost and complexity. For instance, you can simply open a box and put in a new set of earbuds or change out a set of earphones. Or you can lift off an earbud box or earphone pedestal entirely and replace it with a new one in just seconds. This is what we call “plug & play” simplicity.

So, when this display recently needed a refresh or what’s called a “reset,” the process was easy. In this case, adding new products, components and a backlit graphic.

We also just helped Sennheiser complete a similar refresh on a smaller shelf unit designed for Staple stores (at right). It features a capacitive touch user interface (the illuminated panel in the center of the base) that allows shoppers to experience the sound quality of Sennheiser’s PXC 550-II Wireless headphones with a number of different pre-loaded music tracks.

Interested in learning more about our approach to retail design and engineering? Let us know.