Single-store gondola planning is a spreadsheet problem. Multi-store rollout is a coordination problem. The math does not scale linearly. Ten locations do not take ten times the effort of one; they take roughly forty times the effort if you try to run each location through single-store tooling. The extra thirty units of work show up as version control, per-location approvals, delivery sequencing, and reconciling the difference between what a regional director signed off on and what actually shipped to the store.

This is not a fixture problem. It is a process problem. The fixture is settled the moment you pick Lozier. The problem is keeping ten site plans, ten local contacts, ten BOMs, ten install windows, and ten deliveries from drifting apart during the six-to-twelve weeks it takes to move a multi-store rollout from spec to open. Below is how the coordination is supposed to work, where it actually falls apart, and what changes when the client portal and the Store Planner are doing the heavy lifting instead of email and shared drives.

Why multi-store rollouts fall apart

Every multi-store rollout we see fails in the same three places. None of them are surprising in isolation. All of them are avoidable with the right workflow.

BOM drift between locations. A regional director approves the master fixture spec: 4-foot island sections, 78-inch height, 22-inch base decks, painted random finish. Then location 4 asks for 30-inch base decks because their aisle math is different. Location 7 asks for wall sections instead of island. Location 9 needs a 60-inch height because of a bulkhead. By the time procurement compiles the master purchase order, the BOM for each store is a slightly different snowflake and nobody has a canonical version.

Approval bottlenecks that lose provenance. A per-location layout is emailed as a PDF. The store manager marks it up with a pen, scans it, emails it back. Corporate approves that with a reply-all. Two weeks later the same layout gets revised, and now nobody can find the version that got signed off. When the install crew arrives with the wrong shelf depth, everyone can produce an email showing they were following what was approved.

Delivery sequencing that ignores install order. Ten stores go out on the same truck lot. Location 1 opens first, so its material sits in a warehouse for four weeks while location 6 waits for its back panels. Or worse, all ten locations receive their material the same week but only three install crews are available, so seven stores are staring at a pallet of gondola parts they cannot legally leave in the aisle.

None of these are theoretical. They are what a rollout looks like when the coordination surface is email plus a shared drive plus a project manager who is spending 70% of their time reconciling what changed.

What the client portal solves

The client portal at gondolafixtures.com/account/ is built around the idea that a multi-store rollout is one project with many locations, not many independent projects. That framing changes what the software has to do.

Every rollout gets a shared project space. Each location within the rollout has its own record: address, local contact, install window, per-location BOM, per-location plan. But the shared header carries the master spec, the freight coordinator, and the corporate approver, so a change to the master spec propagates to every store that has not yet been approved. Location-specific overrides are explicit: if location 4 really does need 30-inch decks, that override is visible on the master view and does not silently drift out of the master BOM.

Approval state is a first-class field, not a reply-all thread. Every location carries an explicit status (pending, approved, in fabrication, shipped, delivered, installed) that the rep and the corporate approver can both see. The rep tracks which locations are still awaiting approval and reaches out on those specifically instead of chasing the whole rollout each week. The store manager sees which questions their location is holding up. The corporate stakeholder sees the aggregate: eight of ten approved, two waiting on local site measurements. Nobody has to ask.

Revisions are versioned. When location 6 comes back with a request for a taller wall section, the previous approved version is preserved as a revision. Approval on the new version is a distinct event with its own timestamp. If the install crew arrives with the original spec and the store insists it was changed, both parties can look at the same audit trail and see when and by whom the change was approved.

Where the Store Planner fits

The Store Planner is the layout tool that sits alongside the portal. If the portal is the project system, the Store Planner is the drawing board that produces the artifact each location actually needs.

Every location in a rollout gets its own plan. The planner is a drag-and-drop 2D floor tool with real fixture scale, walls, doors, windows, and labels. You drop in island runs, wall runs, end caps, checkout counters, and freestanding fixtures. The scale is honest: a 4-foot section is 4 feet on the plan, not a decorative rectangle. When you export the layout as a submittal PDF, the sales rep, the freight coordinator, and the install crew are all looking at the same drawing.

Plans save into the shared project so the approver can review them without a Dropbox link. Comments thread on specific fixtures: a store manager can pin a note to a specific end cap ("this needs to hold two-way traffic, verify aisle spacing") and the assigned rep gets notified. Revisions stack the same way the portal handles them: the previous version is preserved and the new version has its own approval event.

For rollouts specifically, per-location plans roll up to a single rep view. A rep managing a 15-store rollout does not open 15 separate tools; they see all 15 in one list, with status flags for which are approved, which have open comments, and which have been exported. The plans stay per-location; the visibility is aggregated.

A real 12-store rollout workflow

Here is how a 12-store rollout runs when the portal and Store Planner are doing the coordination work.

Week 1: Master spec. Corporate signs off on the master fixture spec: 4-foot island sections, 78-inch height, painted random finish, pegboard back panels. That spec becomes the rollout header. Every location starts from a copy of that spec.

Weeks 2-3: Per-location site measurements. Each store manager or a coordinator on the ground submits site measurements into their location record. Length, width, ceiling height, existing obstructions. The Store Planner opens each location's plan with a scaled floor already drawn.

Weeks 3-5: Layout design. The rep drops island runs into each per-location plan. Some stores fit two runs, some fit three. End caps go on the aisle-facing ends. The layout is exported as a PDF and posted into the location's approval record. Local store managers comment on their location's plan directly. Any layout question that keeps coming up on multiple locations becomes a note on the rollout header so it does not have to be answered twelve times.

Weeks 5-6: Approval. Corporate reviews the aggregate. Approvals are location-by-location, but the header shows the aggregate: 10 approved, 2 pending site verification. The two pending get resolved with a follow-up site visit or a phone call.

Weeks 6-8: Sourcing and freight coordination. Standard-finish components usually ship in 1-3 business days from our supply chain. The freight coordinator sequences deliveries against install windows: locations 1, 4, and 7 install in week 8; locations 2, 5, and 9 install in week 9; and so on. Material arrives at each store no more than three days before its install window opens.

Weeks 8-12: Install. Install crews arrive with the exact submittal PDF each store was approved from. If a store has a question during install, the assigned rep opens the exact plan they were working from and answers with reference to the approved layout, not to memory.

Twelve stores. Twelve weeks. One point of truth per location.

Common rollout mistakes to avoid

Do not skip site measurements. Every rollout that treats site measurements as optional ends up with at least one location that cannot fit the master spec. Site measurements upfront are cheap; discovering the miss on install day is expensive.

Do not let per-location overrides go unrecorded. If location 4 needs 30-inch decks, that override belongs on the location record, not in a text message to the rep. Text-message overrides are how a location ends up with the wrong shipment.

Do not sequence installs without freight in the loop. An install window that opens the day the freight is supposed to arrive is a window that will slip. Build a three-day buffer into every location's material-on-site date.

Do not use the same rep as sales and install coordinator for a large rollout. The two jobs have different attention rhythms. Sales closes and then wants to move on; install coordination is a two-month project. A dedicated rollout coordinator on rollouts over 8 locations is worth their weight.

Where to start

If you have a multi-store rollout coming up, the fastest path from intent to first approved layout is the multi-store rollout intake form at gondolafixtures.com/resources/multi-store-gondola-rollout. That opens a rollout in the client portal, assigns a rep, and generates a per-location plan template you can start dropping fixtures into within a day. As an Authorized Lozier Dealer, we ship the same catalog spec to every location so what corporate approved on the master is what shows up on the truck.

Ten locations, 50 locations, or 200 locations: the coordination problem does not scale linearly, but the tooling does. The client portal and the Store Planner are what turn a rollout from a spreadsheet-and-email endurance test into a project you can actually finish on time.