In 2024, the Belgian home furniture sector was still rather polarised between mass and luxury markets, with a significant gap in the middle. DEBA Meubelen, a family heritage business operating a large scale furniture showroom in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, offered the perfect solution to this situation.

Though well respected locally, they struggled with:

• catching new customers
• delivering to these ones expectations
• converting visits into sales…
• …and sales into long term loyalty
• curating their range
• crafting a brand specific store experience to encourage dwell time and return visits

The brief received by Wave of Engagement was as follows:

• Main objective: to draft an overall future-proof vision for the brand and showroom
• Ambitions:
  • • To strengthen DEBA’s differentiation factor
    • To lay the strategic foundations for future brand and marketing communications
    • To give more customers a reason to visit (more often)
    • To increase efficiency and conversion
• Focus points for the showroom refit:
  • • Optimising the layout, customer journeys and flows
    • Refining the design
    • Strengthening the in-store communication and overall (brand) experience
    • Crafting a vision for specific store areas: kitchens, service counter, cafeteria, etc.
• Focus points for digitisation:
  • • Gaining insight into how digital support could further assist the staff and enhance the customer experiences

The project was envisioned to materialise over a few years. Wave of Engagement was thus commissioned in a first instance to provide short and long term strategic advice only. Practically speaking: quick wins to implement now and a longer term plan for changes to bring as resources rendered possible.

Brand strategist Chloé Van Elsen was commissioned by Wave of Engagement to drive the brand part of the scope, while I would focus on the retail and retail design visions. Our close knit collaboration, also with Tim Gielen, the head of the studio, was instrumental in ensuring the strongest project delivery possible.

Chloe did an amazing job with the brand part of the research phase, which I followed with my retail and customer experience analysis. For this, I led a large scale in-depth research scheme including:

• 5 days of exit interviews (Total: 171 respondents)
• 5 days of customer observations (Total: 28 scenarios)
• 12 customer in-depth interviews
• 7 staff in-depth interviews

This collected information was then thoroughly analysed and compacted into a comprehensive 132 page report, also providing a first view into possible short and long term visions for the store refit.

Following this, Chloe took over again providing a full brand refresh proposal. I then applied this one to my own strategic vision for the physical store experience. In my second report (118 pages) I thus shared advice on:

• key customer shopping missions as identified through the analysis phase
• strategic customer journey maps linked to each mission
• design intents for each phase of these journeys