A few merchandising questions

[SumpinSpecial]

Continuing to work with my SCORE mentor's suggestion to grow myself into a brick and mortar store (to supplement the online channel), I've been learning about merchandising. He advised me to work on planograms and floor layouts for my future shop in order to more accurately estimate how much square footage I'd need to lease. So I have a few questions about planograms:

It seems to me that I'd have to know the display size of each product, so that I can fit it into the plan. Since much of my stuff is drop-ship, I think I could go to competitor stores and take notes of the sizes as they have them displayed. Is this something that people commonly do, like checking competitor's pricing? Or is there a better way to do it?

Online searches for how to create a planogram seem to assume you're starting with a store that's already in existence so you know the shelving size/layout and floor plan. Since I don't have that, can I start with a blank space? Say I'd draw a front door and then plan out my space from that, drawing the primary walking loop, merchandise areas, and finally the planograms for each area. That's kind of inside out from what the online sources say to do.

Is it advisable to buy planogram software to do this? Or are tools like Visio and/or Excel perfectly adequate in this stage of the game?

[vangogh]

I've never owned a retail space before so please take this with a grain of salt. If I've understood right, you want to work through planograms and floor plans and use the information to help you decide on a space.

If that's the case, I would think you don't need to be super accurate, since whatever space you lease will end up changing things. You can estimate how much space you'll want so you know what to look for, but I wouldn't worry about trying to be perfect with this estimate. It's unlikely you're going to ultimately find a space that exactly matches the floor plan you come up with.

Your mentor's advice sounds to me more like an exercise. It can give you an idea of how much space you'll want and it gets you in the practice of working out the floor plan once you have a physical space. I think you can do either without having to be perfectly accurate. I would make my best guesses and then when you are in a shop that carries an item you will, then sure measure it and improve the estimate for your own store.

[Fulcrum]

Graph paper with cutouts that you can label and move around. One of the nice things about this is that you can get pretty close to scale and you don't need to be sitting behind a computer to manipulate things.