We’ve designed and manufactured dozens and dozens of point-of-purchase apparel displays over the years. For us, it’s like fashion: it never gets old. There are so many well established brands and many more emerging brands in the apparel industry, each of which has a unique voice that needs to be incorporated into a POP display or store fixture. Since this week is the Magic Show in Las Vegas, we felt compelled to share one of our most recent custom apparel displays. We’ll show you 4 concepts we developed and then the final production version.
Our assignment was to create a high-impact, freestanding, 1-sided mobile floor display for Louis Garneau’s line of footwear. We have designed other displays for Louis Garneau so we had a pretty good feel for the brand. The 2 examples below show how we were able to customize some of our stock displays in the past to create a sunglass display and an apparel display. On these past projects we were naturally a bit limited by the range and types of stock displays we could customize, but our past work gave us somewhat of a leg up on our understanding of the brand, which we were able to leverage on our most recent project.
For the footwear display, our first 2 concepts (Concept 1A and 1B) were very similar. Both designs featured an MDF base on locking castors with silk screened branding, black laminated MDF side panels with vertical branding, an MDF center divider with different branding variations, 2 branded shoe shelves with direct-printed backdrop graphics, left and right storage areas for boxed footwear, a heat-bent acrylic top with screen printed graphics, and a full-size lifestyle graphic on the back side of the unit (not shown in the renders below). As you can see, both of these concepts met the important test of designing a display that was well branded.
Concept 1A Concept 1B
Our second concept was a slightly sleeker version of the concepts shown above. It featured a white MDF base with white trim and locking castors. The second concept utilized a metal tube frame powder coated white with side and front digitally printed PVC graphics. Like the first concepts, this version included 2 branded shoe shelves against a graphic backdrop panel and provided space for stacked boxes. In addition to the banner header, this concept also included a branded heat-bent acrylic topper, but it was significantly smaller than the full-sized topper we designed for Concepts 1A and 1B.
Concept 2
Our third concept shown below was similar to Concepts 1A and 1B. The primary differences between Concept 3 and Concept 1B are the wrap-around header as well as the different colors used in the graphics.
Concept 3
So with the 4 concepts shown and described above, which would you pick?
Our customer did not pick any of them. Instead, they asked to modify Concept 1A. They requested that we us convert the center graphic column into a shoe shelf column with 2 additional shoe shelves and a shoe sizing chart incorporated into the upper portion of the column. The final production unit is shown below. The design development process was important in refining our customer’s thinking and ultimately ending up with a POP display that we think will sell a lot of footwear.
Production Unit
Jim Hollen is the owner and President of RICH LTD. (www.richltd.com), a 35+ year-old California-based point-of-purchase display, retail store fixture, and merchandising solutions firm which has been named among the Top 50 U.S. POP display companies for 9 consecutive years. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. and graduate of Stanford Business School, Jim Hollen has served more than 3000 brands and retailers over more than 20 years and has authored nearly 500 blogs and e-Books on a wide range of topics related to POP displays, store fixtures, and retail merchandising.
Jim has been to China more than 50 times and has worked directly with more than 30 factories in Asia across a broad range of material categories, including metal, wood, acrylic, injection molded and vacuum formed plastic, corrugated, glass, LED lighting, digital media player, and more. Jim Hollen also oversees RICH LTD.’s domestic manufacturing operation and has experience manufacturing, sourcing, and importing from numerous Asian countries as well as Vietnam and Mexico.
His experience working with brands and retailers spans more than 25 industries such as food and beverage, apparel, consumer electronics, cosmetics/beauty, sporting goods, automotive, pet, gifts and souvenirs, toys, wine and spirits, home improvement, jewelry, eyewear, footwear, consumer products, mass market retail, specialty retail, convenience stores, and numerous other product/retailer categories.