Visual Marketing - Second Hand Shop Window #2

About a year ago I had given birth to a wonderful precious baby girl. And we were packing like crazy to empty our apartment and come back to Central Asia. Because I thought I needed something to do with my life, I went ahead and decorated a shop window.

I had decorated this same shop window a month ago, and I had had so much fun!

So it was time for an update. While I was nursing my baby, sitting on our green sofa, I searched the wondrous world of the internet for tips and hints and ideas. Even though I kind of knew what to do, I did not want to be totally weird and ruin everything. I learned that some shops redecorate their window(s) every week. The common advice was to change the window display every 3 weeks. But well, this is a second hand shop, and once a month is enough considering that it is voluntarily taken care of.

Last time the colors had been orange, yellow and white. This time I chose blue and brown. Ever since 1999, when I was a voluntary worker in a conference place and met lots of new people, I had developed a liking to the combination of brown and blue. I remember the moment very clearly. I was sitting in a living room for the voluntary workers with other young people, and someone from England was wearing brown and blue. And I thought 'I like that!'. And so it was born. My liking for brown with blue. Or blue with brown. Whatever. I never wear those colors anymore, by the way, but I still think they go well together.

Let's start with the background material. It is a tablecloth. Not a material cloth, but some kind of material you can wipe and then when it gets beyond any rescue, you can throw away. I found it in a discount basket and decided to use it for the window. Then the fun part: hunting through the second hand shop for brown and blue things. There happened to be lots of clay pots and plates and even couple of clay lampshades (you can see one hanging in the picture) so I created a little collection of clay in one end of the long window. I put some glass bottles on silver tray.

Then I found a undefined piece of mirror on the floor behind a table in a back corner of the shop. No one would ask for it, no one would look for it, no one was interested. But I washed it and collected all kinds of dishes, candle holders and other things made of blue glass to put on it. It looked really pretty when I was finished. And then when I was still working on the window an old lady came to the shop and asked to buy some of those candle holders. I almost refused to sell them, but hey, this is why I was doing it! The stuff was selling!

On the bench I collected books and scrap materials. There where two or three big boxes full of all kind of left over pieces of all kinds of materials in the shop. Perfect for little or even bigger handicraft projects, but because they were not very visible, customers rarely bought any. I was hoping I could buy most of it, but we were just downsizing with our own stuff that we had to pack away anyway. So I made couple of piles of brown and blue materials on and underneath the bench.

I found some really nice blue books in great condition. I think some of them were new, and they were displayed on the bench. Underneath the bench I just collected any blue book I could find in the second hand shop and piled them on a drawer and on the floor. Someone had donated an almoust complete set of encyclopedias (the brown pile). Only one book was missing. I wonder why? The rest were like new.

I had some clothes up as well, but I did not take very good pictures of them (I did not have a blog then!). But I remember that they sold really quick, and I went in and put some new clothes on the display few days later. It is really true what I learned about the art of window displays: people might not think they need a certain thing, but if it is displayed nicely on the window, it is very likely to sell.

Happy shopping people! And take pictures of great window displays for me!