The process of prepping your premises for use as a toyshop can be challenging. Here are a couple of ideas that you might want to run past the contractor whose shopfitting services you'll be using during this process:

Create an enclosed play area for the children

During the early stages of most shop fit outs, clients will work with their contractors to devise layouts that will enable them to run their shops in a way that will encourage sales and make it easy for customers to browse through and buy items. When you reach this stage, you should put forward the idea of creating an enclosed play area for the children who will visit your toyshop with their parents.

The reasons for this are as follows: when mums and dads are thinking about buying certain toys for their kids but are still on the fence about making purchases, it is often their children that end up convincing them to buy these things. Children who have access to an area in the toyshop where there are samples of large, sturdy toys (i.e. toys that won't break too easily if played with regularly), such as dolls' prams, tricycles and stuffed teddy bears, will be much more likely to persuade their parents to buy these items for them. They might not be inclined to plead quite so much if they only see these items wrapped in cardboard and sitting on the shelves. In short, building a play area and keeping some of your more popular, bigger toys in it could do wonders for your toyshop's sales figures.

Secondly, if the play area is enclosed, it will allow parents who have brought their kids with them to the shop, but who need to stealthily pay for Christmas or birthday presents for those children, to be able to do this without their kids noticing. The children will be preoccupied with the toys in the play area, and will not be able to wander up to the tills whilst their parents are at the counter.

Lay carpet instead of hard flooring

Most contractors who do shopfitting work advise shop owners to go for some type of hard flooring, and with good reason; things like vinyl, tile and laminate floors are easy to sanitise and difficult to stain. However, a toyshop is one of the few retail spaces in which contractors sometimes recommend laying carpet instead of hard floors.

The reason for this is as follows: when children are given the chance to go to a toyshop with their families, they tend to get very hyper and happy. Unless they have parents who are quite strict, a lot of these children will end up excitedly dashing around the toyshop in search of their favourite types of toys. The inevitable consequence of children running around in this manner is that some of them will occasionally take a tumble.

If the floors are made from tile or laminate, these falls have the potential to cause injuries and result in loud temper tantrums; the former could result in lawsuits, whilst the latter might distress the other shoppers by disturbing the otherwise happy atmosphere of your shop. Conversely, if your contractor has laid a thick carpet on the floor of the toyshop, any tumbles the children take won't hurt them and are unlikely to lead to any noisy tantrums.

For more information about shop fit outs, reach out to companies in your area.

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