VISUAL MERCHANDISING
During my second year at University, I discovered an interest in Visual Merchandising. I’ve always had an interest in window displays as they’re usually what attract me into stores. I created a window display for NEXT which helped gain my work experience with the company during the Summer in 2018. I learnt a lot through this experience as it taught me the ins and out of the industry – it was an incredible opportunity.
From developing this interest, I wrote my dissertation on Visual Merchandising - Visual Merchandising and Brand Representation. I developed my VM skills further through thorough research of books, WGSN reports, group discussions, interviews and my own personal experience. This made writing my essay stress-free as it’s a topic I’m interested in which helped expand my research further.
VM fascinates me as you can do anything, you can be as creative as you want and you can express the brand’s identity through the style of the display. I decided to revisit my FMP to use Visual Merchandising to express my own brand - Calart Clothing. Calart Clothing is all about raising awareness for heart disease through the designs of the clothes produced. As heart disease can be complicated, I researched what kind of displays I could do – disruptive display was very suitable as it was on trend and represented the complexity of living with a heart disease. I used this kind of display at my launch event to display my t-shirts.
As part of our Entrepreneur module in third year we had to work as a group to launch our own business idea. Together, we decided to create a live window display using real life models in windows to show the clothes off. We would start a contract with different stores and do one display each season. One of my roles was to be the stylist which I produced a mock-up of different styles that could be placed in the shop window for Topshop. Alongside of this, I also created a mock-up of the window display too.
Scroll down for examples of my work.
Link to Calart Clothing website - https://calartclothes.wixsite.com/calartclothing
