Using a warm color palette and adopting “warm, friendly and inviting” as keywords were two key initiatives when InConvenience Inc transformed a convenience store in Pattonsburg, Missouri, about a year ago.
Alicia LaFollette (pictured above), brand director at InConvenience Inc, Chicago, discussed the project, the company’s prototype, in a session on refreshing stores without razing and rebuilding at the National Association of Convenience Stores Show on Oct. 15 in Chicago.
InConvenience Inc has 25 locations of The Gas Spot and The Goods Spot c-stores in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri. The stores were picked up from shuttered Mountain Express and SQRL Service Station locations. Nineteen of those are currently up and running.
Research conducted by InConvenience Inc found its core audience was likely to be millennial women, LaFollette said. The three keywords came from this finding, and choosing a warm color palette of dusty blues, cream and gold was due to the company wanting to avoid primary colors. Primary colors, she said, “are something you see with a lot of convenience-store brands.”
The Pattonsburg store was the company’s first opportunity to test these initiatives, LaFollette said.
“Then we were able to take the response to that store, both positive and areas to improve, as our brand design throughout our next remodels,” she said.
LaFollette added, “We really hope that these logos and these colors and this iconography really clues the customer into that they’re going to find something really different and exciting inside of our stores.”
InConvenience Inc had a brand “that didn’t exactly hit our standards as far as colors or look and feel, and we needed to change that,” she said.
LaFollette said they worked with a company to help them design the store to bring about a “warm, friendly and inviting” mood.
“And any designer will tell you that the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to change the inside of your building is paint, it's color, and we took elements of our logo and brought that to life,” she said. “We used that gas pump [logo] to create some fun signage. We took elements of that pump and created a pattern. Our branding company calls it a chevron. We think it looks like noodles.”
The designs resulted in “really fun focal points and really fun signage,” she said.
Hire experts
LaFollette said retailers looking to change the look of their stores should hire experts.
“You need to find people that you can partner with and learn things from,” she said.
Showing slides of the store, she said, “This space had a kitchen, but foodservice for our very first store was not something that we were really excited about doing. We were kind of scared.”
She said they were thinking, "What is this community missing? Pattonsburg is a very small town, about 300 people, and this is their only gas station,” she said. “This store actually had never had fountain soda before. They did not have a grab-and-go cooler. They didn’t have a reach-in freezer.”
She added, “Find out what your market is missing with your remodel and then supply that.”
The Pattonsburg location has tables and chairs (pictured above) “because this community is a community of farmers, very rural,” LaFollette said. “They had people come in every morning, get their coffee, get their pastries, sit down, chat and then go off to work every day. We could not take that from them, so we needed to supply that for them.”
“It’s all about a focal point,” she said. “We hope this is very friendly, but also I think part of our goal for this spot and then toward the rest of our remodels is that it’s a place that you want to spend time in. I think a lot of off-the-highway convenience stores might not be a place that you want to spend 20 minutes in. It can be a little scary.”
“We wanted to change that,” she continued, “not only for this community, because this is their only place maybe for food or for their snacks or for fountain soda—we wanted to supply that for them, but we also wanted to surprise and delight the people who happened to stop because there wasn’t gas for the next 24 miles.”
LaFollette said one thing they do to personalize each store is customize a graphic (pictured immediately above left) for each location.
“This is one thing that we do in every single one of our stores because we’re small and we can,” she said.
“I encourage this anytime if you can do this for a remodel: hyper personalize your location and give your community something to engage with,” she said. “We put up a cork board everywhere, and every time I go back to the store, this is never empty. There's always a flyer for something. There is always the senior center calendar up there. There’s always real estate flyers. There’s always something on this board all the time. The community wants this space to engage with. Supply that for them.”
Bathrooms
With bathrooms (pictured immediately above right), LaFollette said they are “where it’s at, and any woman using a convenience-store restroom will tell you that they’re more than happy to use a space that’s clean and well lit and smells good over a place that maybe looks like one of these ‘before’ pictures.”
“I love to supply proof to this,” she said, showing a slide of Google reviews.
“We have almost 60 five-star reviews for our stores here in Pattonsburg, a little store in a town of 300 people who are just so proud to work in the store, to visit this store,” she said.
“Yes, they reference the remodel,” she said, “But they mention our employees and how proud they are to work there. How clean they keep it.”
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