Point of Purchase Design for Shoes and Accessories

In today’s blog we’ll discuss point of purchase design for shoes and accessories. In particular, we’ll show you a really cool system we designed for Charlotte Russe that can be used to display shoes, boots, handbags, and other accessory items. The system we will share makes for an awesome window display but also can be used in any part of the store. It’s modular, configurable, flexible, and economical.

We were challenged by our customer to design a point of sale display for shoes that they could use to display footwear. They really wanted more of a modular glorifier rather than a display that would stock product. Their objective for us was to create a window display that could really draw customers into their stores. Because their stores had different amounts of window space available, they wanted to have a configurable system they could be expanded or shrunk according to space availability. Importantly, they wanted to be able to change up the look over time, feature new products, reconfigure the display by seasons, etc. They also wanted it to look sleek and have a thin profile while being durable and very easy for employees to move around and handle. They showed us a prototype developed by another vendor that was fat, ugly, and expensive.

We decided that the best solution was to use acrylic that we could heat bend in our shop. We went with white acrylic to make the products pop. We cut the grooves in the acrylic sheets on our CNC and then heat bent and folded the material which produced a really clean look with only one glued joint which was virtually invisible. We created a large box and a small box so that 2 small boxes stacked together would equal the height of a large box. This created a large number of possible configurations by combining large and small boxes. The large boxes could be presented in a portrait or a landscape fashion.

The coolest part of the system was that we embedded rare earth magnets on all of the sides of the boxes. The magnets were small and not really visible enough to detract from the look of the display. To embed the magnets we created shallow circular pockets in the material using our CNC and then glued the magnets in place. The magnets were just strong enough to enable the boxes to stick together but not so strong as to make them difficult for employees to pull apart. The magnets also helped to create strength for the overall display since we they enabled the boxes to become structural when stuck together. The execution of this design was not easy since the strength of the magnets had to be just right, the tolerance of the embedded magnet holes need to be spot on, and the magnet polarity needed to be considered when putting the boxes together in the right way.

Although we originally designed this window box system as a shoe and boot glorifier, we ended up concluding that it was a perfect system to display so many products- from handbags to accessories and even other products outside of the apparel industry. It’s really a universal display system that can be used as a window display or an in-store display that can be set up against a wall, on a platform, or even just on the floor.

Below are some sample configurations we created to illustrate the versatility of this display.

The prototype we created is shown below.

Finally, below are some pictures of the display shown in-store.