This Wednesday morning started like any other, all the interns came in and started cleaning and watering the plants in our street display but after that we got to start on something I find very exciting; inspiration/mood boards! For fall 2011 Anthropologie has 7 brand new concepts coming into the stores which include Dome Home, Our Haus, Pantone, Dots, Bespoke, Irina, and Cloverleaf so we spent the entire morning until lunch at 12 creating inspiration boards for the break room for employees to view. While creating the boards we were free to use whatever supplies were in the art room such as wallpaper, markers, buttons, wood, textured papers, etc. I was assigned to the concept called Dome Home which is a concept for our lounge wear section. Since all windows were due last week on Friday, our supervisors decided that the last half of the day on Wednesday would be an "inspiration day" where all the interns and visual managers would travel around the city to view the three other stores windows and displays. Because we only had three hours left after lunch we decided to go to two: Soho Anthro and the giant Rockefeller Anthro. While viewing these two stores Michelle asked us to consider several questions; Who are the core customers? What is the overall feeling of the space? What particular architectural qualities help support the stores visuals? How does the merchandising reflect the customer? How did this store execute each concept?
Visuals and Merchandising from Rockefeller store:
Visuals and Merchandising from Soho store:
On Thursday, in the early part of the morning we brought out and placed new merchandise, while somewhat trying to make small transitions of concepts for fall, even though its still July. Most old concepts somewhat overlap ideas with the new upcoming ones so its fairly easy to slowly put new pieces in the them. Each morning before Anthro opens, we have a morning meeting around 9:40 or so and this morning we did a special activity which I loved. The opening manager that day put everyone's name who was working in a hat them had another hat with a scenario in it. We each took a turn pulling out a name and a scenario from each hat then had to find an outfit in the store (accessories included) that fit the person's personal style and upcoming event. I ended up picking a fellow intern, Cara, who was going to a morning meeting hypothetically. I picked her out a beautiful yellow owl print blouse, with navy chino pants, a bright coral suede belt, cognac pumps and simple gold pumps. After lunch all 3 interns working that day hopped in back stock to help get the back area into perfect condition.
On Friday (my usual visual display day) I helped with merchandise again because both visual coordinators had the day off. Alot more fall sweaters and dresses had come in from shipment that morning so we began to place them in a room with the concept "Botanica" which had a very preppy, structured, yet colorful vibe. While Michelle and I worked on clothing, Elizabeth helped create a new display for our in-case expensive sunglasses to attract more sunglass sales. We continued to rearrange the store until lunch time. After lunch, Elizabeth and I spent our time adding magazine and digital pictures to the hung inspiration boards from Wednesday. We pulled photos from the internet, Bullet magazine and even Vogue. This week was very focused on finding personal inspiration :).
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