Applications Of Mezzanine Floors In Multichannel Retailing
For multi-channel businesses, space is at a premium. Whether you're considering expanding your floorspace to provide a better customer experience or you need more room to grow the ecommerce side of your enterprise, the idea of relocating is a headache that can cost your business precious time and money.
Mezzanine floors provide an alternative option for multichannel retailers. Extra room for many purposes and none of the high costs of moving or expanding your available space.
If you're looking for a way to expand the room you have by using the space you already occupy, considering a mezzanine might be the ideal solution. We cover everything you need to know about mezzanines and how they can be helpful for your business, from shop floors to warehouse divisions.
How Does A Mezzanine Help You Maximise Space?
For many businesses, floorspace is a concern, as once you reach the limits of the building you're in, there's no way to squeeze an extra few metres out of what's available. Mezzanine floors handle this problem by using the vertical space within your premises, effectively utilising dead space for properties with higher clearance to potentially double the square footage available to your business.
By building on top of existing floors, mezzanines provide a stable and practical way to ensure you're getting the most out of what you have.
Unlike extensions, much of the work involved in mezzanines is minimally disruptive. After the initial installation, all of the work required is completed a floor up – leaving your current space free for customer access, employee operations and the general functions necessary to operate your business.
How Retailers Can Use Mezzanine Flooring
The flexibility and versatility of mezzanine flooring make it a strong choice for retailers looking to diversify across their multiple channels or simply make the most of their space. As a practical option to introduce space for all kinds of purposes, your preferred usage of mezzanine floors can be tailored to your particular business challenges. Some examples of how you could use mezzanine floors for your multi-channel retail premises include:
Extending Shop Floor Space
Extending the floor space within your retail premises is ideal for showcasing a wider variety of products or expanding into new markets beyond your current stock. For example, many retailers utilise additional floor space to introduce a secondary product range within the same store, such as introducing menswear in addition to womenswear without sacrificing existing retail space.
A larger shop floor enabled by a retail mezzanine also provides more room for creativity. By expanding the space available to shop in, retailers can focus more on customer engagement and branding, creating an enjoyable experience for consumers to keep them returning for more. With more space, it's possible to bring larger, bolder concepts to life to make the most of your retail-facing storefront.
Adding Additional Retail Facilities
With a growing business comes greater requirements for the operational running of your retail store. As you experience growth, you may find that the spaces available to you aren't providing everything necessary to keep your store running optimally. For instance, an undersized stock room can be unsafe and challenging to manage, making it harder to restock shelves. Additional space gives you more room for day-to-day operations to keep everything running smoothly.
Retail features don't just benefit the management side of your business. More space provides the opportunity for more benefits for customers. For example, a mezzanine could offer the perfect amount of space for an on-site café or salon. Expanding changing rooms or adding more till space can help improve the customer experience throughout the buying journey, encouraging them to come back to your store repeatedly.
Implementing New Storage Solutions
The ecommerce side of multi-channel requires larger and larger space investment the more stock you have and the higher your distribution rate. Separating retail from ecommerce by placing them on separate floors can be invaluable to avoiding confusion and ensuring you have the space necessary to be flexible to changes in volumes of orders or different requirements throughout the year.
Much like the ecommerce and retail market, your storage needs will fluctuate throughout the year. A storage solution or stockroom shelving system that provides plenty for slower months can be quickly overrun around sale times or during the months leading up to Christmas. Investing in a new mezzanine floor can ensure you have the breathing room to store ecommerce stock on-site without spilling into other areas of your business during busier months.
Providing Administrative Office Space
From handling online customer service to managing general business finances, a lot of administration is involved in multi-channel retail. Whether you're planning to bring customer service in-house or considering expanding your operations with new team members, a mezzanine can offer a way to maximise the space you have for back office and administrative purposes.
Additional staff also introduces the need for more facilities. Installing a mezzanine floor offers room for individual and open-plan offices and other requirements. For example, a server room, kitchen, or additional staff bathrooms. By maximising the space you have, you're also able to provide yourself with room to grow in the future as staffing needs change.
Creating Specialised Warehouse Divisions
Implementing individual workflows for different areas within an ecommerce warehouse is an invaluable way to keep your operations clean and your processes simple. As customer expectations change, creating a division between returns handling and outgoing packages, for example, is an effective way to avoid confusion and to ensure each process is as streamlined and straightforward as possible.
A mezzanine floor offers physical separation between the two workflows. Whether you move all ecommerce operations to a single floor within different rooms or prefer to have them on different floors entirely, a little separation can go a long way towards improving your processes. Introducing more floor space makes this a far easier task to achieve, and is increasingly an essential solution for ecommerce warehouse design.
Making Room For Automation
Automation can provide significantly improved efficiency to the picking and packing processes required for today’s ecommerce warehouse solutions, removing the human element to maximise productivity in your warehouse space. However, fitting automation into an already crowded storage facility may not be possible if you have little room to spare. With most robotic systems requiring suitable flooring and enough clearance, the more room you have, the easier it will be.
A mezzanine floor provides the benefit of the floor space you need and suitable terrain purpose-built for robotic functionality. Investing in a purpose-designed floor provides a platform for automation and helps to make the transition as smooth as possible. Instead of reworking cramped storage spaces, mezzanine floors provide room to breathe and plenty of space to manoeuvre for automated picking solutions.
Providing Shared Space For Partner Businesses
Expanded space can be beneficial for more than just your own business. Whether you have existing partnerships in the field or planned upcoming collaborations, additional floor space gives you the option to essentially rent out areas of your retail store to provide an all-in-one solution for customers. For example, a clothing brand could partner with a jewellery company to introduce dedicated stands in-store.
Whether you offer the space for temporary pop-up shops or you use them to advertise long-term partnerships, more floorspace introduces new and exciting opportunities. By moving the bulk of general retail to a second mezzanine floor or further back into the store, you can use the prime real estate at the front of your business to provide your customers with an exciting and engaging experience in one place.
When it comes to partnerships that are focused on distribution, a warehouse mezzanine can be used to store goods from partner brands, for example, to help efficiently deposit, pick, pack and distribute their products while maintaining a degree of separation from your own product lines within the facility.
Bringing Distribution In-House
If you're currently relying on a distribution company for your ecommerce business, you may have considered the benefits of bringing everything in-house. Without the additional costs of a distribution centre, you can increase your profits while providing a more personal touch in your picking and packing to improve your online customer experience. By taking back control, you're able to ensure standards are met throughout the process, and using a mezzanine floor for storage within your existing warehouse is a great way to gain the additional space needed to manage distribution internally.
Bringing distribution in-house requires a significant amount of space, and means in part introducing and applying some of the same warehouse solutions for logistics providers that 3PL providers may utilise. A mezzanine floor can create room for storage, allowing stock to be brought onto the premises and picked by an in-house team to send each order out.
If you're keen to enhance your customer service, provide better turnaround or have greater workflow management, an extra floor offers the additional space you need to complete that transition.
Expanding Your Diversification
If you're a retail store that has dabbled in ecommerce, whether through social media or online markets, you may have plans to step up into a full-fledged online retailer to keep up with the shift in consumer purchasing habits. Investing in a mezzanine floor can be a valuable way to have the flexibility you need as you grow. Much like creating your own website and putting money into online advertising, investing in your space now can save you problems later down the line.
More space is always better than less – and ensuring you have the resources and space needed to expand as demand increases can help you keep up with changes and adaptations. Ecommerce growth can happen overnight, making good preparation necessary to diversify and successfully provide your customers with a great experience.
Extending your floorspace is an ideal solution to grow your multi-channel business. Get in touch with our expert team today to discuss how we can help you make the most of your retail building with a new mezzanine level.
Your Mezzanine Installation Partner
At Avanta we have decades of experience in designing and installing mezzanine flooring solutions for clients in the retail and warehousing sectors. We specialise in working with retailers operating bricks and mortar stores, as well as warehousing operations for distribution and e-commerce retail including businesses operating in sectors from fashion and FMCG to building supplies, electronics, homewares and much more.
Whether your focus is in-store, online, or both - get in touch with Avanta to discuss how our turnkey mezzanine solutions can help your business.
