Talking Shop with... Brad Cox

Brad Cox, director of marketing and sales for Trion Industries, says retailers should focus on and determine needed merchandising solution innovations of their own to help better their sales. Talk about what is happening with Trion Industries. Brad Cox: Today, more and more retailers are requesting sophisticated, new merchandising solutions for cross sells and adjacencies. To address this need, one of Trion’s recent rollouts is Dual-Lane Auto-Feed Trays. Offering two lanes in a single tray better supports display of families of products, alternate sizes, or totally different and unusual adjacencies, such as Bacon Bits marketed adjacent to salad dressings, both next to a primary sell like prepackaged salads. This kind of display and marketing variety can be applied across many grocery departments, including cooler and freezer. It also is available as a bar mount or shelf edge solution to broaden usefulness even more. The more sophisticated these types of cross sells, the greater the effect on impulse and total sales and profit for retail. This is precisely the desired effect for fixture savvy retailers and outfitters. And the ability to use the same fixture design across all departments is an additional advantage as there is no need for expensive custom solutions by department or redundant stocking of competing componentry. What challenges lie ahead with retailers in regard to fixtures? With the vast breadth of product offerings and varieties, grocers require even stock fixtures to work harder and do more. The fixtures must coordinate well with products in center store, on the perimeter, in specialty departments, in coolers and in freezers. Trion works to address these growing needs with a vast array of choices within each fixture category. Need molded as opposed to extruded pushers? Prefer brand imprinted to clear Front Productstops? Need a system that mounts to bar, pegboard and slatwall, or sits on the shelf? These are all challenges to efficient retail fixturing, and challenges that Trion addresses from the start. All are easily accommodated to the benefit of the retail end use. And accessory and sub-component choices extend across multiple Trion lines, again for easy fixture planning. For example, both molded and extruded pusher paddles are available for wire- or metal-sided Tray, Bar-Mount, and Shelf-Mount Auto-Feed Systems. So once you find a component that works for you, it can be implemented across all your Trion hardware choices. How do retailers benefit from new fixtures? Modern fixtures bring a great deal of new functionality to the store. They increase sales and profits, reduce labor and shrink, help maintain date ordering at the shelf-edge and can even auto-face entire departments. Hardware solutions that are applicable storewide simplify outfitting compared to custom department-by-department one-up applications. Of course clean, new, well-finished fixtures do a lot themselves to set an attractive shopping environment—something that cannot be overlooked by retail in an age of online competition. What is the next step for the retailer and how can Trion help? As a developer and manufacturer of fixtures, Trion focuses on providing merchandising solutions—whatever the retail need—by offering the widest choice of shelf management, auto feed, storewide labeling solutions and even simple display and scan hooks. Trion is also capable of making changes to standard as well as new products to suit retail needs all the more closely. So the next step for retailers is to focus on and determine needed innovations of their own to better their sales. Then, challenge their fixture suppliers to not sell a single one-size-fits all solution, but demonstrate how the fixture can accommodate and serve the specific end need. Trion can do that.