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Add a Spark to Your Store with Holiday Decor

Precious Stones
An emerald is as green as grass;
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.

A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world’s desire.
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire.
— Christina Georgina Rossetti

Holidays present opportunities to celebrate your customers and staff with festive store decor. Deliver an inclusive holiday message, using non-traditional props and language.

For walk-by traffic, specially designed windows are a must. Drive-by traffic demands a different scale of display. Scale, lighting and design plus your merchandise need to be considered. If your merchandise is intimate like jewelry, utilize eye-level displays at 42” minimum. Light the window frame with a colourful low-energy rope of light or use coloured lamps and theatrical gels.

Decorate your showcases, counters and shelf displays and the store itself. Use a common theme or colour to unify your décor. Experiment with trendy colours like diamante silver or the hybrid orange, ignorange. Alternatively, repeat the colour of your logo and develop it in a myriad of tones and textures, using dark green ribbon, lush green-gold lights and pale velvet green draping, for instance. This year’s fashion celebrates exotic ethnic patterns. Have fun with draping and layering colours and textures, satins and velvets, fur, fake fur and leather.

Choose the merchandise you want to feature and build your ideas and your theme around it. Brainstorm with staff or family. Clear the clutter inside your store before you begin. For inspiration, peruse fashion and home decorating magazines, trendy Internet sites, movies and live theatre. Collect natural props like strange-shaped stones, boughs, driftwood, pine cones, even broken ceramic pieces and old computer boards. What about your children’s art like papier-mâché animals, cut snowflakes, gold-sprayed corks and posters? Ordinary objects used in an unusual way create extraordinary visual merchandising. Consider partnering with a local organization like your city’s ballet company to promote their holiday season show, using their posters and props.

Your décor should enhance your store’s image. So if you have a cool store, you may develop an elegant bright white and silver, gold-accented window, dripping with ribbon, baubles and beads. Warmer colours like rosy pink with gold, patterned paper and textured backdrops evoke familial warmth.

If you’re decorating a window, do a rough sketch using cutouts to represent your props and merchandise to see how things work together. If you choose one singular stunning prop or piece of merchandise, work outward from it as if you are laying tile. Send someone outside and across the street to see how your window works, making suggested adjustments for maximum impact.

Use the holiday planning to develop a time line for visual merchandising changes to be made throughout 2006. Decide how often you will present a new image in your windows and store; tie it in with your annual/biannual sale, if you have one. If you have a major in-store event, factor it into your scheduled plan. Once you have decided the dates, even if you do not plan what you will do, you will have dates and can jot notes down, collect props and plan ideas as they occur to you. Make this holiday an opportunity to make 2006 less stressful.

Now is the time to play on all of your senses. Serve spicy mulled cider or cranberry tea and sensuous treats like Turkish delight. Use fresh pine boughs. Play music. Mix the traditional with the exotic to invoke the spirit of the season. Celebrate. Good windows attract photographers. Make sure your store’s name is part of any window display. Entice folks inside and delight them with your festive feel.

Taking A Global Look at Design
For the past few years, we’ve had interns from different countries of the world working in our Manhattan offices. Maria Brime-Yusta returned to Madrid, Spain this spring, after working with GRID/3 International for four years as a fully qualified interior architect seeking international experience.

Annabell Arnecke from Hamburg, Germany joined us this October as an intern, adding international retail design expertise to her schooling. We keep abreast of world trends while interns learn about American professional practices. GRID/3 International is constantly working to see beyond our own borders and to take a more global look at the world around us.