As kids all over finish up their summer reading lists and teachers assemble their lesson plans for the upcoming school year, parents too must begin preparing for the end of the season and the beginning of a new semester. Families will soon be scrambling to find new wardrobes, whether they’re to replace clothes that have been outgrown over the past year or to simply keep up with the current styles and trends.
You need to make sure you incorporate the back-to-school theme in your next wave of store displays to show customers that your business has everything parents will need for when September comes around.
Set the scene at the front of your store
When customers are walking around, stores that catch their eye have an advantage during the busy shopping season. The best way to grab people’s attention and let them know what new products, sales or events are going on is to make a statement in your windows.
Window displays can do so much more than just showcasing products. If you use your imagination, you can captivate customers with familiar scenes that help inspire the choices they make when it comes to purchasing clothing, accessories and supplies for when the school bells start ringing again. Display fixtures, accessories and props can be effective tools to set up a back-to-school theme that may help parents and students find what they’re looking for this school year.
A miniature classroom in the window can recreate the moments scholars of all ages will soon grow accustomed to once again. If you can find any, set up some desks loaded with books, notebooks, pencils and papers to help add another layers of depth to the displays presenting your back-to-school selection.
This can help shoppers relate the inventory to its intended purpose and get them thinking early on about what they’ll need to get before fall. If you don’t have any furniture that can double as a classroom, use some simple display cubes to contain props to a restricted area so the window display doesn’t get too cluttered.
If you have any blackboards for messages, hang them in the background with daily lessons scribbled on them. You can change up what’s on them every day to add a dynamic level to your theme that will keep shoppers intrigued. In the middle of addition and subtraction problems, you can write a back-to-school message to herald in the season.
Remember your audience
It’s important to keep in mind the range of your audience, especially during back-to-school when your target audience encompasses a wide range of ages. To properly exhibit the scope of your selection, use mannequins to represent the clothes suitable for all the demographics.
For the high school and college kids getting ready for another year, your adult-size models are perfect for displaying whatever’s in fashion right now. Don’t be afraid to use the visibility of these mannequins in your windows to present some of the smaller accessories, especially any that students might need. Throwing a backpack around their shoulders is an easy way to help shoppers visualize themselves or their children walking through the hallways in a new outfit.
For the kids of younger ages, scale it down with child mannequins to properly demonstrate the styles the little ones will be wearing this year. You can separate the age groups in different window displays or put them all together. Maybe assemble them into a scene that could be a group of brothers and sisters waiting for the school bus at a stop. Colored tissue paper draped from the ceiling can help isolate your models from the rest of the store and even act as a canvas for artistic endeavors to help with the flow of the theme.
