Griffin Technology: the planogram room

The professional middle of the arc. As Director of UX at Griffin Technology — then one of the largest makers of iPod and iPhone accessories — I built a research program that studied products, packages, fixtures, shoppers, and cars as one experience. Its signature instrument was a room.

The planogram room was a mock retail environment inside Griffin’s R&D building: slatwall, gridwall, gondolas, end caps, pegs, packaging prototypes, and competitors’ products, arranged so shoppers could do what they actually do at Walmart or Best Buy — drift, scan, compare, pick up, put back. The premise was that you cannot learn how a product will be chosen by testing it in isolation, because that is not where the choice happens. The mandate, in the program’s own words, was to study Griffin’s products and customers “in the wild… outside the hallowed halls of R&D.”

The shopper is the unit, not the SKU

A purchase decision in a store is distributed across package copy, shelf adjacency, sight line, price, the reach of a hand, what the shopper already believes about the brand, and the car they are buying for. The research program was built to watch exactly that — and it named its targets in the old conversation-analytic vocabulary: where a shopper accomplishes the task, “where they suffer breakdown, how they repair or route around breakdowns, and where activity comes to a stop.” The same lens from the 1995 lab, pointed at an aisle.

My favorite finding was a category transition that only became visible in the scene. A shopper believes she is done with FM transmitters — then spots a dock with an AUX cable, pulls it off the peg, and realizes the newer connection might actually fit her car better. The insight was not “the package tested well.” It was that FM could not be thought about in isolation from AUX: the real question was how retail adjacency guides a shopper through a category that is changing under her, with imperfect knowledge, one product at a time. The planogram does not merely display the category — it represents it to the shopper, and a representation is a design act.

I’m an envoy from you back to the product development teams.

— how I framed the role to a room full of retail buyers.

From warehouse mock-up to category captain

The room was not a demo. Over its life we ran dozens of studies through it, with single shoppers and paired shoppers — the same naturally-generated-protocol logic as the 1995 study — and we rebuilt, inside a warehouse, the MP3 and wireless planograms of Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and the Apple Store. Then we put the research where buying decisions actually get made: we mapped our recruited shoppers onto each merchant's own internal shopper personas and showed the buyer how their shoppers responded to their existing planogram — and to the planogram we proposed for our offerings. We ran that play at every seasonal reset and line review.

The program had an institutional spine, not just a signature room: a standing research budget, roughly two dozen focus groups a year, quarterly usability groups, and biweekly ethnographies in the field. The two tracks answered different questions — the lab showed how shoppers accomplish goals; the field showed how culture, age, and circumstance shape use — and neither alone was sufficient. The 2008 program proposal stated the room's purpose in language I still stand by: to show product developers the “curatorial” effects of the physical display — and the module-based planogram findings became reusable category-strategy references that traveled across retailers.

That cadence is what turned research into revenue. Griffin became category captain of the MP3 and wireless planograms at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target — the vendor a retailer trusts to arrange the shelf itself — and the work helped drive the business from $5 million to $300 million in revenue. The relationships outlasted the role: the year after I left Griffin, Best Buy's Exclusive Brands team brought me to Minneapolis to run a new-product-development session and design-thinking exercise for their own team.

Why an aisle is an agentic-commerce problem

Strip out the slatwall and the planogram room is the discovery problem at the heart of agentic commerce. A shopper moving through a changing category, weighing competing products whose claims are not directly comparable, nudged by whoever controls the arrangement — that is the user standing in front of a wall of agents. Who gets shelf space is who gets admitted; adjacency is ranking; the package is a pitch. And the brand’s own store still closes the deal, the same way the fortress still owns the final transaction. Retail anthropology turns out to have been a dry run for how people will shop through agents.

Case study · late 2000s, Griffin Technology. Retail research with Walmart, Apple Retail, Best Buy, and Target. ← The Practice