Monthly Archives: June 2018

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery refit ChangeLog

Retail

Photo of newly refit shop at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

After much planning, preparation and excitement the week of 25-29th June 2018 was the building of our shop refit at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. The first time in our history that we’re commissioned a specialist cultural heritage shop fitting firm, ARJ CRE8. It is the end of the week and many people have worked very long hours to smash out the out shop fittings and build us a shop that we can be proud of…and most importantly increase profit.

The shop is complete and ready for customers on Saturday. We have a small snagging list and need to visual merchandise properly but this is scheduled for early next week. For now we just need to ensure 100% of products are available and nothing is missing /left in storage.

Today is a proud moment

Thank you to everybody who encouraged us throughout the week and/or lent a hand.  A special thanks also to Bristol Museums Development Trust who agreed to significantly contribute to the cost of the project. I can’t thank Andy, Jon and the team from ARJ CRE8 enough for their professionalism, problem solving ability and relentless cheerfulness!

Now let’s go out and prove you don’t need a stockroom…..hehe

ChangeLog

29th June 2018
  • 07:20-10:00  GO! GO! Go! Moved as much products as possible from storage to the shop and our holding space. Big thank you to the staff who volunteered some time to make stuff around
  • 07:45 – 17:00 Finished up adding doors to bays, shelving, lighting adjustments and painting
  • 11:00 accessories arrive from courier to enable visual merchandising of the shop
  • 12:00-16:30 a few of our international volunteers came to the rescue and helped us prepare shelving and get products out on the shelves.
  • 15:00-17:00 move the pop-up shop fittings back into the shop and setup the tills and digital signage
  • 15:30 sold to our first customer despite being technically closed! A visitor really wanted our Millerds Map so I showed him our new bay and we made the sale!
  • 17:00-18:30 vacuum, clean and move out any non-critical products and accessories
  • 18:31 Shop is ready to open Saturday morning
28th June 2018
  • 07:30-10:00 move stock from deep storage
  • 10:00-13:00 move bay units into position
  • 13:00-18:30 wire and light each bay, reconnect air-handling which appears to have been out of action for years, finish cutting ceiling tiles
  • 17:00-18:30 move products to outside shop ready for restocking Friday morning
27th June 2018
  • Build bay bases and measure out precise bay locations
  • Wire perimeter
  • Ordered accessories for displaying products
  • Wire networking to shop
  • Empty final waste to skip
26th June 2018
  • 07:30 Ceiling fitter arrives onsite to fit ceiling tiles on existing tracks. Quickly discovers that all the track is obsolete and needs to replace entire track
  • 08:00 Zak tears shirt moving pallet full of ceiling tiles
  • 08:30-10:00 set up pop up shop in front hall. Shop takes £496.35 gross during day
  • 08:30-11:00 Replace obsolete circuit board
  • 08:00-21:00 Continue work to perimeter walls. Edge of ceiling complete and 50% of ceiling track fitted
25th June 2018
  • 06:30 Skip arrives…in wrong location…… 2hr wait for move
  • 8am Contractors arrives and unloads tools
  • 08:30 Contractor begins to gut existing shop walls and ceiling
  • 10:00 Retail team begin to review products for pop-up shop which will run 26-29th June
  • 09:00 Sparks begins to review wiring and remove old…discover circuit board is ancient so we get in Carters to assess and agree to replace on 26th
  • 10:00 Waste for skip removed to front of building and loaded into waiting skip
  • 14:05 [redacted!]
  • 14:15 Building Practice team called to assess wall
  • 15:00 Large lorry of 38 shop bays arrives and is unloaded
  • 16:00 Stone mason’s make wall safe by carefully taking wall pillar apart without further damage to each stone which is then stored
  • 17:00 Second large van arrives to deliver central bay units and small fittings which is unloaded
  • 17:45 Remaining waste loaded into van
  • 17:45 to 18:15 Clean up of route
  • 19:30 Evening private hire event starts
24th June
  • Team of 6 empty all shop products and move to holding location
  • Old fittings e.g shelving removed to storage or for recycling

Photo of shop the day before refit all emptied and readyThe shop just hours before the refit to rip out the stockroom, install new bays and maximise the space

M Shed Matchboxes – an alternative audio tour

User Research

This is an Interview with Tom Marshman about an alternative audio tour available at M Shed

Q: Can you describe the new resource you have created?

A: Working together with Rowan Evans (sound artist) we have created an alternative audio tour of the M-shed.

The tour connects up some of the stories I have collected for my performance work within the exhibition about Bristol, sharing stories I heard when interviewing older LGBT people in Bristol about the stories that lie at the roots of their LGBT identity.

The stories are funny and touching, and I’ve presented them very lyrically so the tour almost becomes a long poem that moves you around the first and ground floors of the M-shed.

If you would like to do the tour the audio devices are kept behind the information desk on the ground floor, all you need to do is ask for one from a member of staff. The audio devices are encased in vintage matches, so you collect your headphones and match box and move around the space.

The piece was originally a live performance walk around the old city, around St Nicholas market so a lot of the stories are based there, most significantly the Radnor Hotel, which was a known gay venue from the 1930’s onwards.

 

Q: What is it about audio that made you decide to use this medium?

A: Each story is represented by the sound of a match striking; the stories burn brightly and quickly like a match, sharing a story before you move on to the next story. The idea for this came from one particular story where a man met his life partner by being asked for a light.

I really wanted people to feel like they were heading back in time with this work and that there was a retro vibe going on. I didn’t want them walking around the galleries with cutting edge technology I wanted something more tactile and evocative of stories people tell, this is why I chose the matchbox.

 

Q:  How does your product differ from a usual museum audio guide?

A: In my work I am not so concerned with facts and figures, what I want to do is tell a good story and in particular the stories of older LGBT people which could soon be lost.

I think they add a new texture to the exhibits in the M Shed, bringing out the human stories within the objects and focusing on LGBT stories. LGBT stories are often whitewashed in museum versions of history, where we told the stories of the ‘powerful white upper class men’ instead. This work, I think, helps address this imbalance, and adds a new range of stories so that M Shed represents the diverse and exciting Bristol we live in.

These are stories I think everyone will enjoy hearing the stories, although some of the language is a bit racy so over 16’s only!

 

Q: Do you think the technology presents any barriers to access?

A: As an artist I’m based at the Pervasive Media Studio within Watershed Cinema where many artists and technologists are exploring ways to work with technology in new and exciting ways.

Amusingly, I am a technophobe, so for me to understand it, it has to be very simple. Because of this, what we have created is super easy to use, the only thing you have to do is turn it on, find the right volume, and follow the directions of where to move to within the audio tour. If people have smartphones they can also request a link or scan a QR code, to find the tour online. So technically they don’t need to have the matchbox, but I feel that spoils the fun slightly!

The important thing for me, when I am working with technology, is that it doesn’t get in the way of the stories and that the technology supports it, rather than presenting a barrier. And if anyone finds any teething problems, then I hope they’d mention it to the information desk so we can improve accessibility.

 

Q: How do you think the museum could learn from this project when developing their own audio resources?

A: The M-shed is not just about Bristol as a place, it’s also about the people of Bristol. And I love that it places importance on a wide-range of people too, not just people that are deemed to be ‘the great and the good’. I think our project reinforces that and tells us about a group of people whom you don’t often hear about.

I hope adding this will bring new LGBT audiences into museums to connect them to our history, as well as introducing non-LGBT museum-goers to it, all in an engaging and fun way.

As an artist I love working in museums because they are rich in stories, and I think it’s important to find new ways to share and celebrate within the museums. 

Move Over Darling talks about people’s lives, deaths, loves, friendships and sex lives in a way that many museums don’t. The way our society treated LGBT people up until very recently has become a shocking and shameful secret history, and projects like this one can help museums tackle these difficult issues as well making sure the positive stories of LGBT people are not lost.

There’s a personable quality to the work I make too. All the people I tell my stories about on the audio tour I have met, I know them and we have exchanged our stories in face-to-face conversation. Though you don’t get to hear my stories on the tour, the human exchange during this research has indelibly influenced and shaped how I tell these stories. Sadly a big contributor to the content passed away last year, it is nice that his stories are present in the museum in this way.

 

Q:  How can people access the content?

A: You can collect the matchboxes from the front desk at the M-shed anytime they are open, you can also find it online here and listen as you walk around the museums.

This is an ongoing part of the exhibition so hopefully my voice will be in the museum forever or at least until it doesn’t feel relevant anymore. Perhaps in a few years I will add more stories, we’ll see!

 

 

Preparing to refit Bristol Museum & Art Gallery shop

Retail

Between 25-29th June 2018 we’ll be closing our shop to gut the space and build a new and improved customer offer. I thought I’d take the time to explain the details of the project just ahead of the actual build.

The shop was last refit in the early 1990s and in the past 18-24 months it has been a daily struggle to grow the business within those dated constraints which are primarily:

  • Space isn’t used effectively both behind the scenes (stockroom) or in the public area of the shop and cannot be optimised further
  • the fittings are very dated and the super wood effect weakens our brand
  • a partial  2016 refit saw improvements to sales by introducing LED lighting, dedicated nesting tables and a bookshelf area which increased sales by over 100% for those categories
  • although the ceiling lighting has dramatically improved the general vibe, the majority of products are still not lit well which doesn’t show products in the best way
  • the bays are all slatwall which constraints our options for displaying products, limits the visual merchandising and has poor space/density

We went out to tender and successfully secured the expertise for design as build of ARJ-CRe8. Originally we hoped to complete the project earlier this year but we missed the narrow window. As the exhibition exits through the shop we can only do the work between exhibitions so a June date was set.

We had a reasonable budget, a contractor and a GO date. As with all my collaborative projects we use Basecamp to communicate with all the project team and to keep other interested parties in the loop. I love tools like this as they cut down on meetings and keep a full history of questions and decisions that we can refer back to. It means when we do meet face to face it is super productive. Between February and April we worked together on the design, staff feedback and drawings. In total we’ve had five evolutions of the original design. Each iteration is an incremental improvement to the previous direction and catching missed constraints.

I was keen to completely remove the traditional  “till” area as I believe this isn’t a productive use of space and the future of retail will be till free. However we’re not quite into the future so my colleagues successfully convinced me that being an early adopter isn’t always best. We will test a till free approach in the near future!

Now that the design is in the final build phase we know that the refit will:

  • remove the stockroom to give us 20% more shopfloor space and 31 total bays with under unit storage
  • allow us to provide a better customer experience with a shop designed and built for a heritage customer
  • use the removal of the stockroom to properly implement an effective buying and stockholding procedure – hold less stock to keep as much cash free as possible and not own risky products
  • increase serving from one cashier to up to two at the same time which has long been an issue
  • improve category management by having clearly defined zones
  • allow us to introduce improved security measures [redacted]
  • introduce a shop that is aligned to our brand with new colour ways and point of sale
  • improve flow from the exhibition area and give a better connected interaction of the exhibition and its related products
  • increased high price  point products with lockable units
  • allow us to study what we can maximise in this space to inform Project Alfred, our project which seeks to redevelop the building eg should we move the shop in that project or leave it by the exhibition space

We have been busy with lots of small but important detail such as moving key infrastructure, planning how to run a pop up shop in the front hall during the work and how to work with the exhibition team who will be in derig mode.

We expect a significant increase in sales and the hard work begins once the build is complete. We’ll have transformed the space which are in effect is our foundations and we can now set about building a very successful retail offer from these strong beginnings.

Ill let you know how we get on….onwards