Trimming Your Store

Last year, Allison Murphy won a Gifts & Decorative Accessories Visual Merchandising Retailer Excellence Award for the Christmas tableaus she designed in 2001. She offers these suggestions for making a memorable holiday impression.

Time it right. Don't push Christmas before your customers are ready. Allison says, "A long Christmas can be its own undoing. People aren't excited and they're not into decorating their homes yet."

Make a big splash. Allison gives up a week of sales just before Thanksgiving to close the store and mask the windows while the decorating goes on. Excitement in the community is allowed to build, and any lost sales are more than made up on the first day of re-opening.

Maximize your space. Allison exploited the high ceilings of her small store by using "umbrella" trees, which expand outward as they go up to form a canopy. She decorated the trees with product that could be "picked" like fruit. She also used "pencil-thin" trees set on the floor and risers with bins below for product storage.

Sell your displays. Eye-catching displays create a market. Make sure you're not promoting props that you're not selling. Allison sold her trees at the end of the season.

Layer your displays. Create vignettes that offer a profusion of products alongside the featured item.

Use creative lighting. Allison recommends Rice Lights, which come in a range of colors and have a feature that lets you choose the way they twinkle. To create low-cost, high-impact lighting (such as moonlight) she uses theatrical lighting gels, cuts them to fit her regular lighting, and attaches them with clothespins.

Show customers "how to." Welcome Home displays colorful silk botanicals in galvanized tins, creating a virtual flower market of Christmas greenery. To boost sales, Allison has a salesperson on the floor to demonstrate how to make bouquets from the silks.

Display in more than one location. Allison also boosted sales of her silk poinsettias by including them on her trees as decorations. She advises telling customers how many poinsettias (or other decoration) they'll need for the size of tree they're trimming.

Keep it fresh. By all means repeat your successes and build on them, but make sure you add to and change both the displays and the merchandise so it always feels new and exciting.

Besides serving as visual merchandising director at one of New York's permanent showroom buildings, Killian also has private retail and showroom clients all over the country, and in Asia. He offers this advice to retailers:

Plan ahead. Stephen thinks that most retailers wait until too late in the season to plan their holiday presentations. He begins planning for his Christmas clients as early as the previous February.

Track the Trends. For Christmas 2003, Stephen sees manufacturers focusing on European glass. Red, green, and gold will be safe colors. Look for less white and silver, and some new, creamier twists on traditional gold. Lodge is still around, but trending more traditional and less woodsy. The romantic look is less frilly. On the cutting-edge side of design, Stephen points to trees in shades of salmon and peach, and peacock blue and olive. But he warns against buying into those trends without carefully analyzing your market beforehand.

Be realistic. Look at the buying habits and the trends in your community. "Don't try to be clever at Christmas," Stephen advises. "Most shoppers tend to buy traditional when it comes to the holidays."

Let your mix evolve. Focus on things you already have that you can reuse, and look for ways to make them fresh. When you're buying, think about what sold well in previous years, because these days consumers are looking for merchandise to mix with what they already have.

Pack your plans. Take color and design plans to the trade shows. Stephen shops the winter shows with a file of tear sheets from magazines and color paint samples to make sure his merchandise buys fit in with his design concept. Digital photos can help too.

Don't over decorate. A Christmas tree, for example, doesn't need more than a dozen SKUs of different decorations. Offering more will only make it difficult to stock enough inventory.

Consider scale. The ornaments on each tree should vary in size, texture, and shine.

Top it off. The most neglected part of a decorated tree is the top, according to Stephen. As an alternative to commercially available tree-toppers, he suggests getting creative by stringing bunches of ornaments together.

Combine real and faux. Decorate an artificial tree with real pine boughs for a scented sensation. It's easy to do, just stuff the real boughs among the artificial branches.

Highlight merchandise. Stephen uses white light to show off ornamentation, believing that colored lights can make it hard to see product.

Before rejoining his family's wholesale Christmas decoration business, Richard ran seasonal-only holiday stores in a variety of malls. His retail experiences included an array of merchandising techniques any retailer can use.

Stay on message. If you're a Victorian store, carry Victorian-themed ornaments and accessories. If you're a sports store, offer sports-oriented Christmas ornaments and nutcrackers.

Make it fun. People like to laugh at amusing displays, Richard says, especially during the holidays.

Go all the way. Decorate your whole store. Richard suggests that if you want to prove how much holiday decorating improves sales, decorate just half your store and compare sales from both sections.

Have sufficient inventory. Never have just one of an item shown in a display. You don't want to have to take the display apart.

Don't get tied to the tree only. Evaluate your space and chose the form of display that's right for you. Richard recommends his company's roll up, pre-lit wall trees and wreaths in all different sizes. Half-trees and other unusual shapes also help retailers decorate difficult spaces.

Decorate high and low. Fill in all the vertical spaces.

Windows are key. Animation will draw customers' attention.

Beyond ornaments. Display some of your regular inventory on a tree, or in a wreath or garland.

And finally: Keep on dusting!