I have just got back from a week in Edinburgh, installing some visual merchandising windows and a
huge installation at some of the big stores. It has been a fantastic week and everyone at the Edinburgh International Festival office and the stores were all so nice and welcoming. Edinburgh is a beautiful place and we were lucky enough to be able to go to the city at the build up to one of its busiest times of the year.... festivals.
So starting from the beginning we ( a team of 4 from university, we have just graduated in visual merchandising and promotional design) were approached by EIF (Edinburgh International Festival) back in April to design and install windows for three of the city's stores, these were Waterstones, John Lewis and Edinburgh's famous department store, Jenners.
We arranged to visit in June to take a look at the spaces and talk through our concepts, this trip clarified what was required and the message that needed to be conveyed. With this we went away and created a design that could run into a window scheme throughout the stores. The design demonstrates the uplifting feeling that was discussed in our first meeting through the use of doves, which is the theme for the festival this year. Surrounding the birds are the festivals brand colours through a skyline of Edinburgh and graphics etc.
The festival starts on the 9th August so we travelled up to Edinburgh last week to install our designs. We started the week by installing Waterstones window on Princes Street and the John Lewis at St James centre off Princes Street the following day.
Waterstones, Princes St
John Lewis, St James centre.
On Thursday we went to Jenners to decorate the Atrium, this area is a huge beautiful landing at the centre of the store. This store is so beautiful and I can see why a lot of people in Edinburgh have a soft spot for it. The interior has so much character and you see it plays a huge role in Edinburgh's history. Also this store is huge, there are so many ways that lead you to different parts of the store, I thought I had seen it all then I would find another doorway leading to another huge department. It would be easy to get lost in here. We had made up all the decorations before the trip, so we followed a plan to where all the doves decorations were to be placed. Doing this allowed us to put the installation up quickly ready for the store opening for customers to see.
I was so happy with the way the installation turned out, the doves flying from one side of the atrium to the other looked really effective.
Next we moved on to install our window at the front of the store at Princes street. this was the biggest of all the windows and consisted of two large graphic posters at the background and at the front is a skyline with merchandise on show. Jenners are selling EIF merchandise in the store on the second floor which is exciting so we were able to include some of the merchandise in the window.
I will put an image of the finished Jenners window at a later date as it was taken on another team members camera.
On Friday the local press came to take photographs of the atrium, also Jenners are the sponsors for the festivals performance, Tatyana. What made this so exciting is that customers were taking pictures of the installation, we even seen a young boy take a picture. The fact that people from all over the world were in Edinburgh for the festivals were taking pictures of our installation is something to be proud of. The staff at Jenners were all so lovely and helpful too, they gave us some great advice about the window and the industry.
After a long, busy but exciting week we went to catch our 3 hour train ride home at around 4pm. I would like to thank EIF and all the three stores for being so helpful and welcoming. I would definitely like to return to Edinburgh to spend some time enjoying the lovely surroundings as we didn't get to see some of the cities beautiful sites once we had finished our windows we would go for tea then straight to the accommodation and was in bed by 8pm every night as we were so tired. Visual Merchandising is definitely hard physical work.
This project is so valuable to the my future in the industry as I was able to experience every aspect of visual merchandising, from meeting the client, designing, problem solving, working with the organisers and printers to installing the designs from my computer into the full scale windows.
No comments:
Post a Comment