Before a single snowflake falls, flashes of holiday appear in store windows: bustforms draped in sweaters of every hue, eye-catching mechanized displays, and bright red signs promoting must-shop deals.
Once across the lease line, shoppers are lured onto the salesfloor with a carefully orchestrated, seasonally appropriate production that sets senses a-stirring and cash registers a-ringing. But behind the breathtaking displays of holiday fantasy are months of planning, strategizing and experimenting to balance retailers' books come New Year's Day.
Kate Campbell, director of the Fashion Retail Management program at The Art Institute of Tampa (a branch of Miami International University of Art & Design), says stores have a small window of opportunity to drive holiday sales, which can make or break a business in the current retail climate.
"[Consumers] have a short attention span," says Campbell, who has 30 years of retail experience as a buyer and manager. "Especially in the way our industry has developed with fast fashion and deep discounts, it's more important than ever to capture the customer's attention and keep it fresh and new."
Teams of fashion merchandisers develop a holiday strategy by looking at sales history and trend forecasting, which comes from magazines, runway designers, competitive shopping, and professional trend organizations, Campbell says. Add personal opinion and instinct, and retailers are ready to build a holiday plan.
This year, Campbell expects focused product assortments and narrow inventory levels as a reaction to the glut of old merchandise that retailers sat on after a dismal 2008 holiday season. But because of deep discounts across the retail landscape, customers have become immune to competitive pricing. Sale messaging alone no longer sways shoppers, so retailers need true show-stoppers to make an impact, she says.
"It really has to have the wow factor: ‘Wow, I'm willing to spend my money on that, I can go three weeks on mac ‘n' cheese just to have that pair of shoes or just to buy that gift for someone,'" Campbell says.
Creating that ‘wow' factor requires the right mix of business acumen and creativity from the fashion merchandisers. Making the front display interactive, with merchandise easily accessible to customers, helps to complete the sale, Campbell says. She cites Coach, Crate & Barrel, and Bath & Body Works as examples of retailers that successfully sell merchandise right off the display.
Each type of retail outlet - department stores like Macy's or Neiman Marcus, chain stores like Old Navy or Express, or independent boutiques - follows a slightly different process to land on a merchandising strategy that will drive sales. To drive holiday sales, each store type adapts key retail tools - such as color scheme, tagline messages, price promotion, and product placement.
For mall retailers and department stores, work for fashion merchandisers involves a visual team, buyers, planners, and divisional merchandise managers.
"Visual merchandising is lighting, signage, product placement, mannequins," Campbell says. "But merchandising also can talk to merchandise management, where you're making product assortment decisions and allocation decisions."
At smaller boutiques, the store owner relies on his or her fashion and business sense to dictate the holiday plan, says San Francisco on-air stylist and lifestyle TV host Katie Rice Jones.
For boutiques, the holiday merchandising strategy differs from chain or department stores, because the independent shops rely on what she calls an "inspirational aesthetic" to entice customers. By focusing their window displays around distinctive, high-ticket items, boutiques draw in shoppers looking for unique holiday pieces they won't find anywhere else, she says.
Because boutiques buy fewer units and place holiday orders later, this type of retailer also benefits from a more flexible timeframe, says Rice Jones, who worked as a Gap distribution analyst, a Macy's assistant buyer, and national style media spokesperson for Mervyn's.
"They have the advantage of getting closer to the holiday season to see how things are trending," she says.
While large department stores may rely on an internal trend department to direct buyers toward the upcoming fashions, Rice Jones says, boutique owners follow a more subjective path, buying merchandise that corresponds to their own aesthetic.
Whether in-house or outsourced, trend forecasters are a valuable investment in predicting what is hot and what is not, says Mari Davis, editor in chief of international retail blog FashionWindows.com.
"Some trends are so obvious... Like for fall 2009, the trend is ‘black is the new black,' because that's what was on the runway and that's what designers are proposing for fall 2009/winter 2010," Davis says. "Other trends are more subtle and hard to predict."
The trend presence extends beyond the product assortment as well. What appears in mass retailers' splashy windows draws as much from pop culture as from fashion, says Campbell of The Art Institute of Tampa.
The full-on fantasy windows at high-end department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York often inspire the mass market, she says. These stores reference famous artists, theater, opera, or what's popular in music.
Still, the experts agree that keeping an eye on the bottom line is essential to thriving in this year's cautious retail environment.
"Art is important," Davis says, "yet in the retail business, what rings up the register is king."