MAKING A BIG IMPRESSION
THE ART OF VISUAL MERCHANDISING
By David Jenkin
Many years ago, the potential of excellent visual merchandising really hit me. I had just read an article by the great Stanley Marcus, founder of Neiman Marcus, entitled “The Case of the Oriental Rug”.
At the time I was the Merchandise Manager of an "independent" department store, with full buying and selling responsibilities. And we had just received a huge shipment of Oriental rugs. The next morning I phoned our Display Manager and asked him to meet me in the floor covering department where the rugs were neatly stacked in piles, half a metre high. “What I want you to do” I said, “is to create a Persian bazaar right here in the department. Let's get rid of these stacks; let's hang the rugs from the walls and the ceiling. And let's get spot lights and music to create the ambience”.
The Display Manager did a terrific job (the term Visual Merchandiser hadn't been created in those days). And to everyone's delight the customers responded as if the rugs were precious jewels. Although I didn't recognise it at the time, this was my induction to the power of visual merchandising.
Cascading champagne glasses, colour co-ordinated walls of bath towels, tumbling towers of books, stacks of soft toys, colour-blocked jelly beans, ceiling-high bins of designer jeans, expensive silk ties endlessly folded. This is the world of visual merchandising. For some retailers, the 'word' is almost out of favour; designers say they have built it into the store design. In other cases power presentation has replaced the word but not the concept.
The principle is what really matters and the principle hasn't changed at all. It's all about presenting merchandise in the most eye-catching way.
Generally speaking, the vast majority of retail stores are boring and sterile. Far too many retailers place merchandise on the rack or shelf in the same way you would expect to see it in a warehouse; it's only the size scale that is different. Lots of stock; little appeal. And yet retailing is all about catching the eye of a potential customer, and then completing a transaction.
It is probably true that the most competitive of all retailing environments are the great markets of the world. The Pike Place Market in Seattle; Covent Garden in London; the famous bazaars in the Middle East, the Seafood Market in Sydney; the Victoria Market in Melbourne. In these intensely competitive market-places visual merchandising is a supreme art.
Much of the produce and many of the products are identical – the difference is often in the ability of the merchant to attract your attention, to draw your eye away from another display, to capture your custom, to complete the sale. In Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, I stumbled across the largest open-air market in Africa; surely the largest market in the world. For as far as the eye could see, small 'retailers' were sitting on the ground, or standing idly about displaying their wares.
In one section, larger than twenty supermarkets lined up together, individual spice merchants were calling to customers and doing their best to out-manoeuvre their colleagues. But across this strongly perfumed landscape of product, one stallholder's display grabbed my attention.
Every other merchant had used matting or makeshift benches to show the range of spices on a horizontal level, but one creative African had stacked hessian bales, shoulder high, with one bale of each product slashed open, to show the particular spice spilling out. It was a spectacular presentation.
My colleague said to me “Wouldn't he lose a lot?” My reply said something about the volume he was selling!
Some retail stores, to remain competitive, must introduce new stock every week or so; other retailers like homeware stores (IKEA, House etc.) must rely on innovative visual merchandisers to keep fairly standard merchandise lines looking smart, different and new. The primary issue here is how to make the store a place of passionate attraction; how to make the merchandise so visually arresting that customers will be caught up in the wonder of it all; how to create presentation points that cause customers to touch the product, to pick it up, to taste it, to try it on, to connect with it.
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