Welcome!
Window displays define a store's image, but the merchandise just inside the door tells customers if they want to come in
By Linda Cahan -- Gifts & Decorative Accessories, 7/1/2007
What do people see when they walk through your front door? Grab a pen and a piece of paper and walk outside your front door.
Breathe a few times. Close your eyes, turn around and open them as you walk back in. What is the first thing you see? The second and third? Write them all down.
These areas are where you need to focus your attention for seasonal and holiday merchandise presentations. In an ideal world, you'd have a great seasonal display set up six to 10 feet on the other side of the welcome mat.
One specialty store in New York had a unique problem: Customers would actually walk up 10 steps to the store, look in, turn around and walk back down the stairs. As a consultant, I was asked to figure out why people weren't entering the store.
The answer was simple — a large fixture was blocking the view of the rest of the store. The merchandise on the fixture was dark, the area was poorly lit and people were not impressed with what they saw upon entering. We moved the fixture, added some bright colors and made sure customers could see appealing merchandise presentations from the front door. Business picked up 75 percent within a week. Sometimes it's that easy!
