'Living' Vignettes

Lasting Impressions Home Gallery, located in St. Petersburg, Florida, is a full service design firm and accessories gallery. In addition to catering to high-end residences, Lasting Impressions provides services for upscale yacht and commercial interiors. The gallery offers everything from accessories to lighting, artwork to florals, and area rugs to furniture. President and interior designer Susan Nice does all the buying herself, dealing with more than 428 different accessories manufacturers, 400 furniture vendors, and numerous lighting companies.

All of the merchandise at Lasting Impressions is attractively organized into "living vignettes," which are updated as new shipments arrive. Needless to say, with so many vendors, new inventory is delivered daily. The displays are designed by Nice, or by fellow interior designer and showroom manager Laura Anderson.

Nice plans ahead at market, choosing large pieces first and then selecting accessories to coordinate colors, scale, and style. Her plans have to be flexible. Sometimes the furniture arrives first and must be accessorized with existing stock. At other times accessories sell through before the larger pieces have even been delivered. To deal with these issues, Nice has a simple solution: Buy more. She maintains a separate accessory room in her warehouse, where merchandise waits to be included in a vignette. It doesn't have to wait long; Anderson changes the showroom weekly.

Lasting Impressions Home Gallery is a family business. Besides Susan, her husband, Gene, and sister and brother-in-law Dottie and Frank Hakala, are involved. The company originally opened in 1989, as Lasting Impressions Interiors Inc., in an 1,800-square-foot space. Three years ago, it moved to the current 9,000-square-foot location, and its name was changed to Lasting Impressions Home Gallery, connoting a place where shoppers could pick up an accessory or two without feeling compelled to order an entire room's worth of furniture. The new name also better reflects the broad mix of product available for purchase.

But some of the most compelling visual merchandising Lasting Impressions does is not seen on the showroom floor. That's because it is executed in customers' homes as part of the store's home accessorizing service.

Nice and her staff go out to view homes and assess existing decor. They take measurements for artwork, and the height of ledges for plants and accessories. Susan often takes photographs to help her develop a design scheme.

If the client is not working with one of Lasting Impressions' interior designers, Laura Anderson selects suitable accessories for placement in the home. If they are working with a designer, the designer selects the accessories. Once the selections have been made, the store loads up its 18-foot truck, drives to the client's home, and installs each piece in the best-suited location.

If customers make a purchase, there is no charge for the service. If they don't, Nice charges a fee of $85 an hour. But Susan estimates that 99 percent of the time no fee is charged because the client buys something from Lasting Impressions. How much they purchase depends on the house. While some sales are a modest $1,000, Nice has had several sales as high as $20,000 to $25,000. However, no matter the size of the original order, it is often the first of many visits and sales.

Nice says, "Customers like the service. If you just walk them through the showroom and say, 'We can do this here, we can do that there,' they can't always visualize it. If you show them in their own homes, you sell more."

Lasting Impressions penchant for hands-on service has an incredible success rate: Nice places between 95 and 98 percent of all accessories taken to a client's home.

And for those who are wondering whether all that extra work is worth it, half of Lasting Impression's accessories sales in 2001 came from the "in your home" service. The total sales from accessories amounted to $585,120, accounting for some 32 percent of the store's total sales.

That makes a lasting impression.