[Musings of a Game Store Owner] How Do You Organize All This Stuff?

When we first started out, we really didn't have anything in the way of display space. It was about 20 feet total dedicated to showing off the products we had- and there were not very many. We special ordered damn near everything. Many times, we had to wait a week or more to make sure we had enough orders to meet the minimum for free shipping. most of our customers learned to ask when we were ordering next and tack stuff on right before we placed our calls to our rep. 

This is how small we were....

We could fit 3 of the old building inside the new one. 

Things are very different now. We've grown a LOT, and orders happen 2-3 times a week now. We have a "Tardis" of a store - the inside keeps changing and expanding to allow more customers, games and fun. 

It's crazy how many people we can pack in! 

We have a huge "wall o games", and that wall is covered with slatwall, allowing us to showcase our games in very cool fashion. 

We now carry a LOT of games. While we have a lot of space to show it off now, sometimes it gets a little tough to determine the best and easiest way to display stuff for our customers. 

We thought about grouping things in themes or genres... while it's certainly a fun idea, it isn't always practical. Some things don't fit neatly into genres, and then deciding genres becomes something of a clusterscrew based on whose opinion we use to determine themes. I mean, I might put Hive in "horror" since so many people are terrified of bugs... but I would probably be wrong there. 

Bzzzzzzzzz!

So maybe manufacturer might be cool... until we get into teeny tiny companies that really only have one game, or those GINORMOUS companies that have a ton of products. The space inequality issue there is pretty huge, so we tossed that idea, too. 

TheDude had some crazy idea about putting games on the ceiling, as some sort of "Survivor" test to see how much a customer really wanted their game... I pointed out that his wife and co-hort (me) is SERIOUSLY SHORT and his idea was not gonna happen. So out that one went, too. 

We finally settled on a mostly alphabetical arrangement for the largest selection of our games- board games. This seems to work pretty well, because the staff understands the system easily enough, and it's not too complicated to explain to customers. Other things like miniatures, paints, tools, roleplaying, collectible cards, dice and accessories are grouped together in small sections. They sort of organize themselves.  For the most part, they go together by system and then if needed, setting- and we're done.  We also have a couple folks on staff that want to get their work done as quickly as possible, so we like easy stuff. 

The alphabetical thing works well for us, for the most part. We have a burgeoning academic, a wanna-be librarian and a control freak on staff, so it makes sense for us to organize things this way. We DID go a little crazy and decided to organize our Magic cards that way, too; which is time consuming and brain numbing. 

For us, making the organization clearly understood and easy to figure out is key to helping sell more effectively. We want to enhance the customer experience by making things easy to find and causing as little headache as possible. 

We have learned that as much as we hate change and don't want to move things too much, a little bit of fiddling is needed to keep the displays fresh and catch customer attention. Working out a balance between easy to find and fresh and exciting is a lot of work, and we spend more than a few minutes deciding "where to put that". 

Because I'm always interested in what else is out there, I'd love to hear how things are organized at stores you frequent, and what you'd like to see. What works, what doesn't, and why?