Eye Candy! Great Store Design at the Buyers Market

 
Awesome store design can be achieved on a shoestring budget, guest speaker Kristin D. Godsey said today during a seminar on visual merchandising.

Good design needs editing, she said: Remember Coco Chanel’s famous advice about wearing jewelry: After you’ve dressed, take one thing off before you leave the house. In other words, simplify, don’t clutter.

Kristin is the associate publisher and executive editor of VMSD, the oldest  magazine of the visual merchandising and store display industry. At her seminar, “Sensational Store Design on a Shoestring Budget,” she showed slides of award-winning store design, including photos from the files of the NICHE Top Retailer Awards program. 

Amazing designs from New York City store windows and cutting-edge boutiques were shown, too. She urged craft gallery retailers to borrow ideas from the professionally done visual merchandising. Some quick ideas that you can do cheaply and easily:

• A spring display with a string of pearls pouring from the spout of a watering can
• A table of dolls all wearing pieces from one line of jewelry
• A stack of terra cotta pots and silk flowers in different sizes, used to make a garden corner for your outdoor sculptures
• A display of watches and clocks, backed by an inexpensive poster of the famous Salvadore Dali painting of melting clocks (The Persistence of Memory)

Comments

[Preston Lenton]

It would be great if you could share some of the photos of those dolls you were talking about. If you make things interesting enough without making things too complicated, you'll definitely reel in customers. Being elegant is great, but there are times when simplicity wins over it.