Health & beauty
Holland & Barrett cut a third of the shelving and made the store easier to shop
A whole-store category review that reduced shelving and stock by roughly a third and gave the space back to brand and product messaging.
- Visual merchandising
- Space planning
- Retail strategy
~33%
reduction in shelving and stock levels
800+
UK stores the principles scale to
The problem
Holland & Barrett wanted store layouts and product presentation reviewed through both a visual and a commercial lens: every category judged on how it looked and how it traded, not one or the other.
What we did
We reviewed a typical store category by category, Beauty, Sports, Vitamins and the rest, using sales data and customer insight alongside the visual audit. The review cut overall stock and shelving by roughly a third, standardised shelf heights through the store, and set a coordinated colour and material palette for each category. The space freed up went to brand and product messaging. The merchandising principles built in the earlier visual merchandising project were applied throughout, with Retail Development InStore Limited partnering on brand alignment and delivery.
The outcome
A simpler store to shop and to run, with consistent merchandising across every category, and a set of principles that scale across Holland & Barrett’s 800+ UK store formats.
By reviewing all categories together, we created merchandising consistency difficult to achieve working in isolation. This could be transformative across the entire H&B estate.