A well-designed window can pique shoppers’ interest and ultimately boost your store’s profits—even in a digital world. “People are drawn by visuals,” says retail merchandising expert Michelle Sherrier, a showroom display and merchandising expert with more than 40 years of experience in retail. “You have maybe 10 seconds as someone walks by your window or looks in your front door to grab their attention and stand out from other retailers or other footwear brands,” explains Sherrier, owner of MC Design Collaboration, a retail consultant specializing in visual merchandising, and host of the podcast The Retail Whore.
We asked Sherrier, whose extensive retail background ranges from owning three stores at the iconic Fred Segal Santa Monica to heading up visuals in the Santa Monica Anthropologie, to share her most effective strategies for visual merchandising.
1) Think like an architect. Retailers sometimes makes the mistake of displaying everything on one level. Create your own architecture. “The more height you have, the more product you can display,” says Sherrier. Use platforms, crates, boxes—or even unusual items like suitcases to evoke a travel theme—to add height and dimension and give yourself more real estate. Make sure the architecture fits the size and scale of your window.
2) Tie your window into a focal point inside your store. “The first thing people see when they walk into your store should be your focal table. That table display should work hand in hand with your window,” says Sherrier. “The two should tell the same story so that when people walk by and then walk in, there’s cohesion.”
3) When in doubt, color it out. Shoppers love storytelling, whether it celebrates a season or showcases an activity (e.g. hiking product displayed in a camping vignette). Newness should also take center stage in your windows. But whenever you’re stuck with a seemingly random assortment of product, unify it with color. “Displaying only greens or all blues is an easy way to make items that don’t seem to have continuity work together,” says Sherrier.
4) Pare it down. “Retailers often make the mistake of trying to put everything in the window because it’s new or they love it or it’s a bestseller,” Sherrier says. “If you put too much in, it looks like a garage sale. You overwhelm people and take attention away from what you want to showcase. Use less to make sure people see what you want them to see.”
5) Create opportunities for add-ons. Pairing products in your window—socks or bags with certain shoes, for example—makes customers more inclined to buy both. “Any time you can encourage add-on sales that creates more profit,” Sherrier points out.
6) Think digital. Consider having a sign maker print vinyl cutouts with QR codes you can stick on your window to offer customers a discount or another incentive to shop with you.
“Digital marketing and branding through things like QR codes in windows is how the industry is moving forward, so the more comfortable you get with it, the better,” advises Sherrier.
7) Try something new. “My mentor, Fred Segal, used to say, ‘Don’t copy what everyone else is doing. Just challenge yourself to one-up the last thing you did,’” says Sherrier. “Push the envelope. If an idea doesn’t work, try something else. The pandemic taught us that experimenting and pivoting are essential. Before 2020, a lot of retailers resisted building websites or using social media. Suddenly, those became important ways to shop. It caught people off guard, and some of them no longer exist because they couldn’t get out of their comfort zone.”
8) Cleanliness is king. “I can’t tell you how many store windows I’ve walked by and seen dead flies in the display. It’s mind-blowing. People notice that,” says Sherrier. Whenever you or your employees have a lull, clean the window display.
For more merchandising strategies from Michelle Sherrier, go to MC Design Collaboration, follow her on Instagram @mcdesigncollaboration, or listen to The Retail Whore (@theretailwhorepodcast) which features interviews with retailers and manufacturers.
One of Sherrier’s displays, for Loyal West
An episode of Sherrier’s podcast, featuring interviews with experts sharing advice from the retail trenches
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