Parlor Rooms

Selling upscale gifts in a blue collar town is a challenge — and it's even more difficult when your store is off the beaten path. So when Debbie and Ron Lewis decided to open The Shady Lady, a lampshade and electric lighting parlor in Pocatello, Idaho, they knew they had their work cut out for them.

The location they chose was a small Victorian house in Pocatello's Oldtown. The house recalled Pocatello's colorful history, making it the perfect place for a store whose focus was antique lamps and decorative accessories. But the neighborhood didn't have much going for it to lure foot traffic, and the store's structure provided little in the way of window display space. Getting people to notice The Shady Lady — while keeping the genteel Victorian style they wanted — would be a challenge.

To display a large amount of inventory in only 1,800 square feet (The Shady Lady carries more than 30 lines of everything from fine chocolates, teas, and tea accessories to Lampe Berger lamps), Debbie and Ron chose to turn their constraints into strengths, by using the house as a backdrop for their displays.

“My store is a lot of small rooms,” says Debbie. “You have to put in a lot of inventory and make it flow. Everything has a different style but it all has to blend. We play off of that and make one display flow into the next.”

In one room, lace curtains backlit by natural light showcase cottage style white crockery. Elegant woodwork echoes and highlights nearby product, whether it's the flowers in a china pattern or the gilt frame of an elaborate mirror. Even the bathroom is thoroughly merchandised with wall art, mirrors, shelves, frames, and an accent lamp. (The plumbing facilities are for display only.) A kitchen, complete with an ice box and other period appliances, houses an abundance of dish towels, notepads, tea sets, and tableware in a variety of styles.

The Lewis' visual merchandising schemes work on many levels — literally, from floor to ceiling. Layering area rugs over carpet recalls Victorian draft-prevention techniques and coddles customers' feet, encouraging them to stay. Tables, doll furniture, and whatnots with low shelves create lower-level vignettes. Floor lamps draw the eye upward, as do wall shelves, woodwork and window treatments, and wall art, while dramatic ceiling fixtures act as centerpieces of the rooms.

A profusion of lamps shaded in similar colors and styles is allowed to make its own visual statement, like a bed of roses, with coordinated home accents serving as a border. The subtle floral suggestion continues the Victorian theme while crystal dangles, tassels, and bead garlands — part of the product or added to the merchandising scheme — are also used to unify a display, linking discrete pieces on wall and surface in a manner that recalls a flowering vine.

The Lewises also appeal to upward mobility by recalling Pocatello's pioneer past, and the early settlers' yearning for a more prosperous and respectable way of life. “This feeling capitalizes on the renewed interest in elegance and eclecticism,” says Linda Soderquist, a Lewis friend and frequent customer at The Shady Lady.

Nostalgia, elegance, and aspiration form an unbeatable combination that is, ironically, very much of the moment. In order to make sure that Pocatello's blue-collar citizen majority was included in The Shady Lady's retailing aspirations, the Lewises offer merchandise in a wide variety of styles and price points, and are able to mix in surprisingly modern products by highlighting common elements such as color, shape, and theme.

Despite the local doubters who felt Pocatello could not sustain a specialty retailer the likes of The Shady Lady in such an out of the way location, the Lewises have found themselves in the center of the town's business community. So much so, they have seen their business double every year since opening in 2000.

Using the constraints of its limited space to highlight its range of product offerings through creative visual merchandising is among the reasons Gifts & Decorative Accessories selected The Shady Lady as a 2005 REA Silver Award winner for Visual Merchandising.