It's easy to think that it's only what’s inside the shop that matters.
But when it comes to alerting shoppers to the existence of your shop and letting them know what it’s about, there is one supremely adaptable promotional vehicle: the shop window.
The art of window dressing has been around as long as there have been stores, on which basis you might suppose that shopkeepers would be aware of their value and that they’d look pretty good. Yet the reality is that all too often lacklustre windows ensure that shoppers keep on walking.
Giles Calver is a design consultant whose recent work includes a project with design firm Lippa Pearce, on a window scheme for the Co-op, an organisation with outposts in many different business areas across the whole of the UK. The task for Lippa Pearce was to make the windows of the Co-op’s travel shops more appealing.
As Calver points out:
- Your window should reflect what goes on in the shop – it is the first, and sometimes the only chance you get to provide information about your store.
- There is always the temptation to put too much rather than too little in a shop window. In a typical local travel agent, for example, you’ll find everything from handwritten cards detailing ‘late deals’ to sun-kissed posters promoting exotic locations. But have too much on display and not much attention gets paid to any of it.
- You very rarely talk to any owner of a single shop who does not have ambitions to open more of them. But if this is to happen you have to be consistent with your brand.
In the case of the Co-op’s travel shops, where every outlet was more or less different, it was a matter of unifying the approach taken in the windows and simplifying things to make the message more readily understood.
Calver says that initially the plan was to create very spare windows where the number of messages given to passing shoppers would be limited. While this did not happen in the final scheme, if you now look at the exterior of one Co-op travel branch, the chances are now good that it will look the same as all the others.
The best retailers realise that while you may stock huge numbers of products, you just can’t put everything in the window and it becomes a matter of selective editing. Calver cites Selfridges as a store that tends to get it right by picking a theme and sticking with it across its many windows. Top Shop is another example of how good window displays need not cost huge amounts of money. Simple props, coat hangers or pieces of wire are used to create engaging displays that are among the best in the business.
But at a more local level, where there is perhaps only one window and the only display manager on hand is the owner, what is to be done? Calver says that the ‘A frame’, a two-faced mini-billboard that forms the shape of an ‘A’ when in place outside a store, is an effective device. ‘One of the problems facing retailers is that you can only see a shop when you are either in front of it or pretty close.’
An A-frame allows shoppers to see that a particular shop is on a street sometime before they actually get to within visual distance of the store-frontage.
However that this is a marketing device that should be treated with the same respect as anything else that is done in relation to a shop. A good A-frame will carry a small poster that has been thought about, designed and is once more consistent with what happens in the rest of a store.
‘Whatever you do, and no matter how small your shop, design has a part to play in making your store stand out and that however it is done, it should all recognisably come from the same stable.’