What is it?
A CVSM is more than a training tool; it's a clear, concise reference book that helps a chain of stores upgrade and maintain their look. Standards must be maintained in order to retain an image and feed the brand. Each employee is creative in their own unique way. Some of those ways may not be in keeping with your image. A standards manual clarifies your image and gives appropriate boundaries to individual creativity.

A custom visual standard manual details and explains how a store should look and how to keep it looking that way.

A good manual allows room for change and teaches the reader how to access their creativity while staying within the boundaries of the stores' image and brand.

Visual standards include everything that is seen from the parking lot to the back door. It includes: lighting, signage, flooring, all surface materials, fixtures, merchandising the fixtures, displays, focal areas, aisles, wrap desks, maintenance, back room standards, washroom standards and office standards.

The manual will often include the duties of each person working at the store regarding visual merchandising.
 

Who needs it?
If a store chain has an image that requires presentation standards or, they are re-creating their image and want to re-train their employees, a manual is one of the first steps to making this transition happen.

A good manual is a secondary form of training for new employees (on floor training comes first.)

Any chain of stores (chain meaning 2 or more) can benefit from having this training manual.

Some retailers who have benefited from these manuals include: Saks Fifth Avenue, Singer Sewing Machine Company (for their 900 stores overseas), United Rentals (to teach/train the people in each of their locations how to present and sell merchandise related to their rental equipment), American Express Travel Related Services Company (for their 112 locations in the USA to make them better sell their travel services.) The BPAA (Bowling Professionals) requested a manual to help educate their members on how to upgrade their centers and the stores within the centers.

Some other retailers include Armi Studio and Totto in Bogota, Colombia. Each retail group developed new stores and with the new look and created new standards to maintain the new look. The manuals were developed to train their existing and new employees.

What can you do with it?
Once the manual is written and printed it is often distributed at company training meetings. Depending upon the size of the company, the training manual will be introduced at one - or at several similar meetings. For example, the Singer manual was given to all the regional managers of every country and their top managers. There were three, three-day seminars given to the group from East Asia, West Asia and Europe and South America.

At the beginning of the seminar, the book was handed out and then discussed in detail so the managers could pass the information on to their associates in each region.

American Express and United Rentals had the author give five seminars (all the same) to different groups of managers to introduce the concepts in the manuals at their international conferences.

Once the manuals are distributed, the company has a written directive and image that can be enforced. Once the standards are in writing, it gives management something to reference when working with those on the selling floors.

It is a training tool as well as a tool for maintaining standards.