For decades, WSS (a Foot Locker brand) believed the same thing many retailers still do today: more product leads to more sales. Every fixture held inventory. Every wall carried merchandise. Every square foot had a job to do.
It worked. WSS built a loyal customer base and became a fixture in neighborhoods across the Southwest. But as customer expectations changed, the company realized that what had once been a strength had gradually become a limitation.
"We realized if we wanted to modernize the brand, we had to pull back on that," said Gabe Williams, VP of Store Development & Strategy at WSS, during a conversation with Richard Dirstein, Executive VP of Design & Innovation at SLD, at RetailSpaces.
The goal wasn't simply to create a more modern retail store design. It was to create a better shopping experience without losing the customers who had made the brand successful in the first place.
As Williams' team analyzed how customers moved through their stores, they realized their average shopper—a mother shopping with her family—stood roughly 5'1". Their merchandise gondolas were almost exactly the same height.
That meant customers couldn't easily see across the store. Parents struggled to keep an eye on their children. Departments blended together, making the shopping experience feel more overwhelming than intuitive. Rather than asking how they could fit more product onto the sales floor, the team started asking different questions.
What does a customer see when they walk through the front door? What do they feel as they move through the space? How do they naturally shop as a family?
Those questions became the foundation for every design decision that followed.
One of the boldest decisions the team made was to remove product from the sales floor.
Conventional retail wisdom suggests that every square foot should be working as hard as possible. More fixtures mean more merchandise, and more merchandise should mean more sales. Williams and Dirstein challenged that assumption.
They rationalized SKUs, lowered fixture heights, improved sightlines, and introduced what Dirstein described as "moments of pause", intentional spaces where customers could stop, reorient themselves, and engage with the brand instead of being surrounded by endless rows of product.
Those moments also created opportunities for storytelling, allowing apparel, footwear, and key brand partnerships to stand out rather than compete for attention. On paper, it looked like WSS was sacrificing selling space. In reality, Williams said those branded moments have become some of the strongest-performing areas in the store.
"They're actually paying for themselves multiple times over."
One of the most interesting aspects of the retail store design strategy had very little to do with aesthetics.
Williams' team wasn't just trying to create a better experience for customers, they were also trying to make life easier for the employees running the stores every day. That thinking influenced almost every design decision.
The new fixture package was built around flexibility. Rather than creating separate fixtures for every merchandising need, nearly every piece was designed to work with the others, allowing store teams to quickly shift between footwear, apparel, and accessories without complicated resets or new equipment.
The same philosophy extended to the checkout experience. Many of WSS's older stores featured oversized cash wraps that felt more like pharmacy counters, physically separating associates from customers. The new design shrunk the footprint and created a much more personal interaction.
"We were obsessing this idea of a one-to-one connection with our customer," Williams explained.
Perhaps the biggest surprise wasn't the design itself. It was the cost. The new prototype wasn't more expensive than the old one.
"It was cost neutral," Williams said, crediting extensive value engineering and a fixture package designed to do more with less. In some refresh projects, he noted, the new approach is actually less expensive than the legacy store format. More importantly, the results suggest the investment is paying off.
In its first months, the prototype has delivered:
• Double-digit comparable sales growth
• Higher conversion rates
• Better sell-through
• Increased engagement from new customer
• Consistently positive customer feedback
None of those gains came from adding more merchandise or expanding the footprint. They came from making the store easier to navigate, easier to shop, and ultimately more enjoyable to experience.
For retail construction and design leaders, WSS's redesign is a reminder that great stores aren't built by adding more, they're built by making smarter decisions about how people experience the space.