My Company Helps Stores Like Whole Foods Increase Sales By Up to 86% Without Changing Products or Pricing. Here's Our Secret. Too often, business leaders discount the importance of our physical senses.

The restaurant's sign promised "Homestyle Cooking." But when I asked a customer about that, he was dismissive. "If you can't touch it, it ain't real!" he said.

The customer's name was Percy. The restaurant was a struggling buffet brand. Percy ate there because it was affordable — but because he couldn't see any "homestyle cooking" happening there, he doubted the company's claim. That's the kind of insight I love.

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I'm an architect and cofounder of a design and strategy firm that specializes in "visual storytelling" — or how business, social science, and design intertwine to build physical places that bring people together. My team has designed spaces for companies like Harley-Davidson, Whole Foods, Kraft, and Nabisco. On average, we increase foot traffic by 25% and sales by 18% to 86% without changing the product, prices, quality, or service levels — just the environment.

When we were hired to help this buffet chain, we redesigned it and we launched five beta stores — where expected weekly sales more than doubled, going from around $40,000 to $90,000.

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How did we do it? The answer is all there in Percy's comment. We created an environment that customers could see — and touch, hear, smell and taste. Their senses told them what they were experiencing was real, and that made them excited to be there.

The first part of our job is always to listen. We talk to customers, hear their problems, and design solutions. When I worked on the struggling buffet chain, I talked a lot with Percy. He had worked in a textile mill for 35 years and was skeptical of consultants like me; he called us "pointyheaded marketing suits." But I didn't mind, because he intuitively understood what this restaurant needed.

"When restaurants talk about things like quality, service, homemade, homecooked, or natural food," Percy said, "that's all it is — talk! The billboards, banners, TV ads, and radio spots are all smoke and mirrors. If I can't see or touch these fancy ideas like 'homemade' or 'family-style,' then it ain't real."

Humans assess our environments instantly, through our senses. Our involuntary interactions with our environments inform our decisions. That's why, instead of looking at retail places as facilities with departments, we view them as a series of interactive "scenes" that visitors feel with their senses and experience with their emotions. And over the last few decades, we have distilled the art and science of scene-making into five guiding principles. Here, I'll walk you through them using the example of the buffet chain.

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Retail principle #1

A good retail scene reinforces the overall plot, quest, and story of the brand.

When we're redesigning a retail location, we don't think about the space in terms of departments or functions. Instead, we build six to 10 scenes, which create an overarching narrative.

So the starting question is: What is the narrative of this place? What is this story about?

At the buffet chain, their big selling point was "homestyle cooking." That wasn't just marketing; the restaurant put a lot of effort into its food. But all the cooking happened out of sight in the kitchen, and the food presentation was dismal. "This place doesn't look like where a home-cooked meal would come from, as they claim," Percy said. "It looks like a beat-up high school cafeteria."

I heard that from dozens of other customers too. They wanted an experience that felt as close to home as they could get. We know the idea of "home-cooked meals" is a mythology, but "close to home" is also a field of meaning — a bigger narrative we could build our story around. It would inform our decision process, and ultimately become a value proposition.

So we came up with six "scenes" to tell this story: the decision zone, the produce stand, the bakery, the grill station, mom's kitchen, and the country store. I'll explain what they all mean below.

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Retail principle #2

A good retail scene has a beginning, middle, and end.

When a customer walked into the restaurant, the first scene they encountered was what we called "the decision zone." In buffet restaurants, there's a stampede between about 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., and again between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. A line forms while people wait to pay their admission fee, so our job was to get people excited enough about the product to stay in line, and figure out how to get the line to move faster.

Prior to our redesign, the waiting area had white walls, horrible grey putty railing, and a menu board with no pictures. Customers would get so bored in line that they carved their names in the walls, or kicked the walls.

Our vision was to create the "psychological realm" of a woodsy country store. When you walk in, you'd see wood floors, wood railings, and handwritten menu boards. There's a lot of studies saying that if you're shown pictures of food in the right context, it can make you physically salivate. So we printed giant pictures of mouthwatering steak, and butter melting on corn, cropped in really tight.

Now, how did we get the line to move faster? Here's a surprising answer: drinks. When people got to the front of the line, some spent a lot of time deciding what to drink — which slowed everything down. So in the "decision zone" we did a lot of prompting and cueing around drinks. By the time they got to the front of the line, they knew: "I want a Fanta."

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Retail principle #3

A good retail scene has a "mini climax" inside of it.

Before our redesign, the restaurant had a very utilitarian layout. There were about 90 different offerings — salads, steaks, bread — all served up without ceremony. We wanted these groups to feel more distinct and special. For example, the salad bar. We asked: Where do you get the best homegrown produce? Everyone loves a roadside produce stand, so we built one with crates and murals, an awning, and handwritten signs. We did the same thing with bread, creating a real bakery inside the store. The client actually made fresh bread on the premises, but didn't get credit for it — because it all happened out of sight, in the kitchen.

For every scene, we look for a "mini climax." This might be a sound, or smell, or some other impactful experience. The climax for the produce stand came to us after we worked in the kitchen for a few days. I was amazed by what the staff was doing back there, chopping and preparing vegetables. So I said, "Why don't you do this in front of the customer?" The client said, "Oh, that would be messy. And our employees don't dress well." I told them, "That's because they're not in front of people. They will dress better if they're in front of people. That's just human nature."

So they started cutting vegetables in front of the customer, at the produce stand. That sound of a knife chopping the head of lettuce did everything — it's a sensory differentiator on a subconscious level. And at the bakery, every time the baker took fresh bread out of the oven, they'd ring a bell. It was an auditory cue, accompanied by the smell of fresh bread. The client said, "How are people going to know the bell means anything?" We said, "We promise it'll become an insider thing."

And it did.

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Retail principle #4

A good retail scene has carefully chosen props and triggers.

A few good props go a long way when it comes to creating an experience — for both customers and employees. For example, when we were designing the bakery, we went into the storeroom and saw these giant, generic bags of flour. So we went to the executives and said, "You have 538 stores. You must buy a lot of flour. Do you think you could tell the flour distributor to customize the bags of flour with your own logos?" So we created a sub-brand, with a whole backstory about where the flour comes from, and surrounded the bakery shop with these giant bags. Now, when customers see these proprietary bags of flour, it communicates that the restaurant is serious about bread.

Clothing can be another important prop. At the bakery, we had the bakers wear baker outfits, and at the grill station — which we also pulled out of the kitchen, so customers could watch the cooks grilling their steaks — we uniformed them up and gave them badges. We actually created an order, with different levels: black belts, brown belts, orange belts. You could work your way up from "grill journeyman" to "grill master."

When we first told the client about this plan, they said, "Nobody wants to see the cooks; these guys look like Charles Manson." But we said, "If you put Charles Manson on stage in a grill-master outfit, it'll change everything." Sure enough, employees instantly started trimming their hair, trimming their eyebrows, trying to be more presentable. And they began to take pride in their work. Then a miraculous thing happened: They started engaging with the customer! We even got to the point where the chain had the grill master asking the customer, "What type of seasoning do you like on your steak?" Now we have interactive engagement, and that's golden.

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Retail principle #5

A good retail theme has values and reflects what you and your customers care about.

One of the last scenes is what we called "mom's kitchen." Formerly the hot food bar, we built the space to look like a real kitchen, with cupboards above and below the counter. And we put the dishes in ceramic pots instead of metal tins. This scene was a huge hit with customers, because it really landed the "close to home" narrative.

Once we completed the new prototype stores, instead of eating dinner all by his lonesome self, Percy invited his family and friends out for an evening of merrymaking at the buffet chain. Even his teenage grandkids loved the new digs. Eating dinner on a fixed income was no longer an apathetic experience for low-income folks; now it was something Percy could be proud to show off to others. Percy thanked my team and me for making his meals more fulfilling, as did countless other customers.

The most illuminating compliment we got, however, was from the chain's CEO. When we met him after the grand opening to conduct our post-occupancy review and analysis, we assumed he'd be overjoyed about doubling the weekly revenue. Instead, he told us to be quiet for a minute and listen, which we did, but we didn't hear anything except customers conversing over meals.

"That's precisely my point!" he said. "Our customers treat us better than they ever did before. They don't carve their names on the tables and walls. They pick up after themselves, and keep the place clean. And I credit that result to something you said on the first day we met: 'Environment affects behavior.'"

It's true.

Our environments are a melting pot of sensory experiences that cue us in all kinds of ways. The more clear and intentional you are about how you want your customer to feel in every scene, the easier it will be to tell a story, and build a place that accomplishes that task.

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This essay was adapted from Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together, by Kevin Ervin Kelley. Published March 12, 2024, by Matt Holt Books.