Christmas Showcase
Designing the floor plan and leading the way.
Spotlight holds many annual events for its in-store staff, this includes to ‘Roadshows’ a year, one for the Home side of the business, and one for craft. This is a great opportunity to give the staff the chance to learn more about the new products coming into Spotlight stores, as well as provide learning opportunities about them.
And as Christmas is the biggest time of year for retail. It was decided to create a Christmas showcase, displaying all the Christmas themes chosen for the year ahead to get staff excited and knowledgeable about what was to come.
As part of this project, I was tasked to design the layout of the large hall as well as all signage and wayfinding systems. I started by creating a floor plan, laying out each section of the room to make sure all the different design trends and departments had space to be included. I worked out how many tables and shelving displays could fit in each section to best fit each team’s request includign many Christmas Tree displays and other large-scale decorations. I designed the layout in a way to encourage a one-way flow that would pass each section on its way around the room, with signage explaining each of the themes, with each description starting with a famous Christmas song, of course!
Showing More with Less.
Sewing takes time, and although it is the best way to show what a fabric can do, sometimes you need to get a little creative.
As part of the Christmas Showcase, I designed a range of posters that had simple outline silhouettes of many different Christmas craft ideas, whether it be clothing, sleepwear, stockings, aprons, or anything else you may want to sew at Christmas time. Inside these outlines, I placed repeat pattern tiles to give an idea of what they would look like as the chosen garment/project. The posters included a series of short, snappy sayings: Make Me! Sew Me! Stitch Me! as a prompt to get creative.
The Head of Store Operations saw these poster designs on the night of the showcase and loved them so much that they requested them to be used, so they were later implemented by marketing into in-store displays.
I also helped set up many of the displays for the Christmas showcase, including hanging these posters, displaying the bolt stacks, and draping all the fabric. The design team and I also decorated all of the Christmas trees on display at the showcase, a fun, hands-on way to explore our design talents.