the back of your joint/ fulfillment areas

What's in a Name? Blackdog Retail Design

Designing the back of house, employee only zones in a retail store can seem like a waste of resources. I get it. We’re always talking about how your design and ff&e budget should always support selling more products, increasing the per transaction sale. Spend the money on mind blowing displays and they will come, shop and buy. 

Except…

If your back of house isn’t a tight ship and there is a disconnect between the point of sale and the order fulfillment, retrieval and final check, you’re going to have some grumpy shoppers. If your store looks amazing but the rest of the experience is disorganized, sloppy and lengthy, your customers are going to your competition next time. Shoppers always remember the bad stuff and waiting for an order is no exception. 

Your back of house should be organized, well staffed and intuitive. A lot of these details fall on your SOP’s and daily operations. How you fill orders, your unique shopping model and customer interaction all changes the “right” layout for your fulfillment areas.Many of the headaches can easily be solved with a little interior design magic. I nerd out on organization and truly love helping fine tune dispensary vaults, fulfillment and order pickup areas. 

Takeaways if you’d rather not read the details….

  • You don’t need a million square feet to have an optimal back of house

  • Your shopping model will dictate the layout

  • Copy Pharmacies & do a plan o gram. Color code shelves & bins 

  • Shortest path of travel 

  • Book a free sesh with me if you’d like some help https://calendly.com/melinda-1oy/introductory-call

The square footage you do have needs to be organized and consistent. Everything has its place, shelf or bin. The best way to do this is to create a planogram of your fulfillment area. It’s basically a map that shows you where and how each product is stored. If you have flat packs that don’t lend themselves easily to shelving, I love open fave bins that are color coded. Designate a color for product type (carts, edibles, etc.) This is how pharmacies do it. They color code everything and link it to their plan. 

By color coding the bins, your employees will automatically know that “blue is an xyz” and be able to pull and pick products quickly and frustration free. 

In my own pantry at home, I organize my stuff by what it is and how I use it. So baking essentials are all together, snacks, pasta, oils and sauces etc. When I am elbow deep cooking I don’t want to search for something by brand. It’s not intuitive. But if I need soy sauce, I know to immediately go to the sauce shelf and then look for the soy. 

Your dispensary fulfillment should run the same way. Hot selling items need to be in the most convenient spot always. Premium real estate for premium sellers! 

Allow a little flexibility here. When you first open you may make a few purchasing mistakes and misread consumer purchasing habits. And end up with too much of something harder to sell. The point is (from a fulfillment point of view) that next month you won’t make that mistake again. And you’ll want to use that space for a product you do sell more of. Easily change the color coded shelf if needed and re adjust your space just a little. I love removable stickers for color coding. 

Human Movement

Since your employee will likely be pulling 3-5 products per transaction, movement is important. The fulfillment and vault room needs to hold every product and also allow employees to move freely without crashing into each other. I love a clean surface work table with lots of lighting (lol?). Inevitably this employee will be filling to-go bags, retagging things or use the table as a central picking station. 

Pass through windows, pneumatic chutes or even dumb waiter style product elevators work so well for keeping your budtenders on the sales floor and your fulfillment employees where they need to be. I strive to have drive up windows adjacent to a pass through as well so orders can seamlessly be moved to the window employee versus being stored nearby. 

Pass through windows do not need to be large, just super easy to open/close and lock at night. Pneumatic chutes are a fun visual. The speed and breaks can be adjusted when installed to insure products aren’t crushed upon landing. I designed a dispensary where we used a dry cleaning style motorized ceiling rail. Fulfillment clipped the to go bag to it in the back and sent it to the appropriate POS station when complete. Creative order fulfillment solutions can be super interactive and brand boosting. 

Shopping model

There are three main shopping models that will change how your vault and fulfillment areas operate. Here’s a breakdown & how they work:

If your shopping model is vault to floor, you will have vision cases loaded with product and stock and full display shelving behind the pos. This is compared to a bank where each teller has a drawer of cash and supplies. They never (or rarely) leave their chair. When they run low on something, a manager will retrieve what they need from the vault. Same goes for dispensaries. Each order will be picked from your POS area. When your stock gets low, refills come from the vault/inventory storage. I don’t recommend this if you do high volume online orders. 

If your shopping model is a vault to fulfillment to the floor, a passthrough window works really well for this. Think restaurant style. You order, order goes to kitchen, the kitchen makes it and passes it through to the counter, where your server brings it to you. (The budtender is the server in this analogy, fulfillment is the kitchen staff.) This works great for high volume dispensaries where you can dedicate an employee to the fulfillment area. They will also fill orders for your online customers, drive up, etc. 

If your shopping model is shelf stocked, your customers are able to shop it like a supermarket. Pick products off the shelf and make their way to the checkout. This is a unicorn in dispensaries, rarely legal and oftentimes requires a huge amount of security boost. Shelves are then periodically restocked from wheeled carts throughout the day. The carts are parked in the vault, loaded and unloaded. 

Need more individual help? Got a challenging space you’d like a consult on? Feel free to reach out with a free sesh. https://calendly.com/melinda-1oy/introductory-call