design:retail - April/May 2014 - (Page 40)

040 shopping with paco Red Carpet Retail PACO UNDERHILL CEO AND FOUNDER ENVIROSELL p.underhill@envirosell.com H OLLYWOOD IS ONE of the most powerful engines of American culture and influence. We may turn our noses up at the starlet culture and react with horror to the Botox and the tabloid headlines, but where would we be as a nation without it? Not only is it a reﬂection outward, but it's also a medium of social change that has pushed our evolution as a nation. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Twelve Years a Slave" or "Invictus" have pushed our concepts of race. "Philadelphia" and "Dallas Buyers Club" have relaxed our perceptions of sexual identity and AIDS, just as "On Golden Pond" and "Nebraska" have focused our views on aging. What makes for a powerful artistic statement in movies and the theater, is that the medium by its nature is collaborative. We may look at the lead actors and directors, but there is a reason for that long list of credits at the end of ﬁlm. From set to costume design, from writer to cameraman, everyone has to contribute. Movies, theater and retail have lots in common. Visual merchandising and stage design are parallel art forms. Look at the early careers of many of the giants of store and restaurant design, and often there is a theatrical connection. Joe Weishar and David Rockwell designed stage and movie sets. Walk the floor of Bloomingdale's on 59th Street in New York on Saturday morning before the store opens and you feel the drumbeats, as everyone gets ready for the show to open. In my own oﬃce, much of my senior staﬀ comes out of the theater. It is easier to take a smart theater person and teach them math, than the other way around. For those of us in the retail industry, Hollywood's Oscar night is a tribute to the glamorous side of fashion. What does a good evening APRIL/MAY 2014 DESIGNRETAILONLINE.COM gown do? Just look at how many marriages were renewed, romances started and children conceived the night after the evening dress got worn. I have a friend that owns a fancy dress store in a Connecticut coastal town, a hundred miles from New York. She sells prom dresses and eveningwear, and one of her unique selling propositions is that she registers each dress, linking it to the event it was bought for. Buy something from her, and she guarantees no one else will wear the same dress to the same event. Buy it from Macy's or Saks and take your chances. Women and girls come from all over the state to her store. Every year, she hosts an Oscar party at a local hotel. It is billed as a charity event for a scholarship in fashion design for the local high school. This year, she had 200 guests and a waiting list of 50 who wanted to come. Fortyfour girls from the local high school volunteered to model red carpet dresses. Makeup, hair, shoes, accessories-each girl got a chance for 90 seconds of glory for which she dedicated hours of time, mostly waiting. Ian Zeiring from "Beverly Hills 90210" was there, acting as emcee. My friend wore something that looked like a beach cover-up morphed into eveningwear. All that needed to be covered was; everything else was revealed. (We know that women dress for other women; all we see as men is the net eﬀect.) Each dress was described as the models strutted down the runway. The girls loved it. In a world where glamour is often circumscribed in two dimensions, this was real. It was a long night and long next day as the dresses came back to the store, were cleaned and re-hung. It may have been a charity event, but it was an exercise in selling. If I get you to see and look, that is the ﬁrst step to getting you to try it on and fall in love. That beach cover-up and all its sisters in various sizes sold out in the next three days. The show was featured in local newspapers and television, as well as in hundreds of postings and pictures on social media. There is already a waiting list for next year's event. Making movies and running stores are hard work. But the best part of it is where you put the fun in. PACO UNDERHILL IS THE FOUNDER OF ENVIROSELL AND AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS "WHY WE BUY" AND "WHAT WOMEN WANT." HE SHARES HIS RETAIL AND CONSUMER INSIGHTS WITH DESIGN:RETAIL IN THIS BI-ISSUE COLUMN. Photo by ROBB CYR PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.DESIGNRETAILONLINE.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of design:retail - April/May 2014

design:retail - April/May 2014
Table of Contents
Editor’s Note
Show Talk
On Trend
We Love This!
Designer Picks
Innovation
Postcard
How’d They Do That?
Have You Heard?
Mingle
Shopper Insights
Shopping With Paco
Story
GlobalShop 2014
Lord & Taylor
Products
Backstory

design:retail - April/May 2014