Retail windows are expensive advertising spaces and often miss their commercial potential. We share 24 thoughts to inspire great window performance.

Our 2016 retail term of the year is ‘loss of traffic’. Internet competition brought another year of loss in consumer footfall. Many of our retail friends struggled to keep momentum and to motivate for improvements in sales.

Many initiatives are created to grow in-store performance, whilst we observe little that addresses window performance. This is surprising, given the shrinking high street footfall and the need to win in-store traffic.

Christmas is High Traffic Season in all malls (photo: brand pilots)

Have you ever considered that besides the “in-store performance” there is an “out-store performance”, and that you can improve in-store performance by improving your retail windows?

How to Benchmark Retail Windows

As retail managers and consultants, we look at retail windows commercially: we see ‘marketing billboards’ rather than windows. But often windows fail to address the most basic requirements of a good advertising space. Yes, branding is a top priority, but that doesn’t mean you need to avoid being commercial.

To share some of our observations with you, we collected window impressions around Christmas time. In Europe, Christmas is the peak season of retail, when windows experience the highest consumer footfall. As retailers showcase their best practices in window dressing and visual merchandising, it is the best time to benchmark retail windows. Take a look at some of the typical examples we found around Christmas.

Inspire Retail Performance

If you consider that you pay for your stores with likely 15% of your total retail sales, which is far more than you spend in marketing, don’t allow your windows to be just ‘nice and branding’. Make your windows a key success factor in driving store footfall and measure its performance.