Sunglass Hut: each store’s campaign, standards and floor plan on an iPad

A Sunglass Hut store changes with every campaign: marketing-approved banners go up in the windows, items on sale move to the back, stickers on the floor, windows and doors change, and the small props that hold the sunglasses sideways get rearranged or replaced when they break. What a store should do depends on its design and on the products it carries. In 2014 Sunglass Hut wanted to update those standards more often, and needed a reliable way to get each store the version meant for it, on the iPad in the store.

Policies and procedures had the same problem on paper. In Sunglass Hut’s own words (July 2014), associates received a paper copy of the manual “that is not easily updated”: changed pages were reprinted and shipped to stores, stores did not throw out the outdated ones, and they did not know where to look for information within the handbook.

Starting in the stores

Before The Show we visited Luxottica stores. At a LensCrafters store in 2013 the associates already liked their iPad apps and asked for the playbook to go digital, “stop killing trees”; in May 2014 we visited four Sunglass Hut stores to see how standards reached the floor.

The Show: your store, and only your store

The Show runs in the iPad’s web browser. An associate enters the store number once and the portal knows the store’s design and product mix, so it shows only that store’s campaign, standards, wall diagrams and floor plan, with documents opening inside the page. Everything is managed in Web Content Manager on IBM WebSphere Portal, built on our Portal Blueprint component framework, so the home office publishes once and each store gets its version.

Our Way: the manual, searchable

In 2014 we turned the policies and procedures manual into Our Way, a site for every associate and field manager that serves Sunglass Hut’s four store formats, Macy’s, Inline, Outlet and Open Air. We imported every policy into it and trained the authors who keep it current.

Proof back from the store

In the releases that followed, the stores got a way to answer back. Associates upload photos of their setup from the iPad for merchandising to review and grade, and order replacement props through a cart that goes to their regional manager for approval. In 2017, after interviews with store associates and a look at the analytics, we redesigned The Show: more space between tiles and a fixed menu, because the old grid and hidden menu cost associates too many taps; critical updates for changes between campaigns; a store checklist, from store front to cash wrap, that regional managers can follow; photo requests a regional manager can send to up to 200 stores at once; and expired content that clears itself after three months.

Less work for the home office

We supported The Show and its authors through 2023. In 2022 we rebuilt the image uploader so visual merchandising can load each quarter’s store-specific floor plans in bulk, and each store finds its own under “My Floor Plan”.

Store associates see their own store’s campaign and standards on the iPad instead of reprinted pages, regional managers ask for and receive photo proof of each setup, and the home office publishes once for every kind of store. Every change we made after launch came from the people in the stores: the spacing, the fixed menu, the checklist and the photo requests.

After The Show, LensCrafters and Oakley Retail asked for focused portals of their own. We worked with Luxottica for ten years, from the first strategy workshop in 2013 to support in 2023.