Sarah H. Rogers
Sam's Club
Bentonville Center of Excellence
Full-store wayfinding & signage system · Creative Director
THE CHALLENGE
Members were struggling to find what they needed — and underneath that, a real perception problem: club food had a reputation for being less fresh than what you'd get at a grocery store. Sam's Club needed Bentonville to solve both at once: read as a 5-star member experience without losing what makes it a warehouse club, and do it as one system across all nineteen departments.
THE WORK
I led the concept, strategy, and system design for the model club Sam's Club built to set the standard for member experience chainwide — then stayed through fabrication and install. My design was the one selected, installed in two clubs.
I built the framework the whole system runs on: every sign in the club is doing one of three jobs — Attract a member to a zone, Engage/Educate once they're there, or Problem Solve an unplanned need. That's what let a small team make consistent calls across the whole store without a style guide turning into a rulebook.
I brought three creative directions to Sam's Club — one warmer and photography-led, one clean and symbol-driven, one premium with its own sub-brand for the butchery. My clean, symbol-driven concept was the one selected and built out across the full store, not just food — the same system runs the Club Pickup canopy, the tire and battery bay, the pharmacy, the cafe, membership, health and beauty, and every food department in between.
Two pieces of it went straight at the freshness perception: a new prepared food area in the main racetrack — sushi and ready-to-eat meals made in-club — and a redesigned cafe built to make people want to stay, not just check out.
I worked directly with our architectural engineer, building scale mockups and elevation drawings against the real store architecture before anything went to production. Then I spent two weeks on-site in Bentonville and Rogers, on the floor for the install in both clubs.
THE RESULTS
Installed in two clubs — Bentonville, the Center of Excellence flagship, and Rogers. Proven in a second location, not just theorized as scalable.