It’s Gift Show Season! All the marts are buzzing with activity as buyers visit showrooms, order new product, attend seminars, make contacts and look for display ideas. Manufacturers, vendors, showroom and booth designers put immense thought and effort into their visual merchandising. Retailers can take note of this hard work and use the displays as inspiration back in their own stores. Here are recent pictures from showrooms in Atlanta and Dallas.
Stay display inspired!
If you want a lesson in effective use of color in visual merchandising, visit a showroom that carries Global Views products. Their showroom displays are a feast for my eyes. You can see them in Dallas, New York, High Point, Las Vegas and Atlanta. These two pictures are from their area inside the Southern Accessories Today showroom in the Americasmart in Atlanta.
This photo, above, is from their showroom in the Dallas Mart. Last month, I was able to spend an hour browsing this showroom in awe. Global Views is always one of my first stops at market!
One challenge that faces showroom designers – even more than at the retail level – is having to display various seasons at once. Color stories can help differentiate the delivery seasons, as shown here by Scene Weaver at the OneCoast showroom in Atlanta.
Scene Weaver pillows and throws, as currently displayed in the OneCoast showroom in Dallas. Below, is the same merchandise in the showroom in Atlanta today.
Sometimes single colors are the best way to make a statement. This is particularly effective when displaying a collection such as this pink grouping by Mud Pie in the OneCoast showroom in Atlanta. And how cute is that ice cream cone made of petticoat fabric on the wall? This next picture, from the same showroom, uses cloud props and what could be a twin-size headboard on the wall.
Bentley’s Reserve makes the most of their cubical fixtures – shown here before and after stocking it in the OneCoast showroom in Dallas. Notice the placement of product, signage and literature throughout the shelves. The addition of baskets in the lowest cubes give the bottom weight for a balanced display. They created some eye relief by leaving a few cubes empty except for the deco-words Eat and Enjoy. This is an extraordinary display example!
A few more display examples from the Southern Accessories Today showroom in Atlanta:
Once again, their use of color and merchandise arrangement shows a nice blend of mixing metals and a little pop of color. The result allows the white products to really stand out! Product areas are Dwell Studio and Studio A.
Shopping in Stockholm, part 3:
Life preservers have always made good props for resort and spring displays, but the colors, stripes and dots on these took this visual merchandising staple to a new level. These two displays at ACCESSORIZE immediately caught my eye on my way to tour a retail store elsewhere in Stockholm. The background graphics were quite nice, as well. I wish I had taken a picture from further back to get the full effect of this display story. To read/view parts 1 and 2 of the Stockholm Sweden displays, click here and it will open in a new window.
Back in the USA: retail displays from California, Iowa and Florida:
Don’t you just love how the cake stands are used in the displays on these shelves at Daisy’s in Alameda, CA?
At Retail Details, we LOVE interesting vases used for jewelry displays! This one is from RSVP in Iowa City, IA.
Cute display idea for headbands and hair ties using a boot and a bottle at Snap Tweens in Santa Rosa Beach, FL.
Congratulations to HiHo Home Market:
Retail Details & Swirl Marketing send our warmest congratulations to our friends at HiHo Home Market as they celebrate being named Country Business Magazine’s2011 Retailer of the Year! Last fall, on a retail tour through Connecticut and New York, we were lucky enough to visit HiHo Home Market in Gardiner, NY. It is a lovely shop filled with an eclectic mix of current and vintage merchandise. Upstairs there is a room dedicated to Christmas year-round. The owner, Heidi Hill-Haddard has a true talent for visual merchandising and all 15 rooms have imaginative displays that change often. In fact, they were a finalist in our New Year Store Display contest earlier this year. We have featured HiHo Home displays in the blog several times in the last few years and look forward to sharing more in the future!
Stay display inspired!
~Becky
Becky Tyre is a Florida-based journalist, visual merchandising consultant and display designer. She writes about retail topics, blogging and visual merchandising for national and trade publications. You can read her most current articles in Gift Shop Magazine. She is the owner and writer of the Retail Details blog at SwirlMarketing.com Email: SwirlMarketing@comcast.net
The floor of the store window at 
Father’s Day is not in June in Sweden, but we stumbled upon this menswear display window. The frames were filled with scrunched white fabric for a very interesting effect.
At the entrance to each store, a pedestal was placed with signage promoting the dandy theme. Atop each pedestal was a glass dome and each store created a vignette display featuring items from their store.
At their Brookhaven store in Georgia, 
This CUP OF TEA display is courtesy of 
The coincidence, you may ask? This display is from the 
