Teacher MarHoliday Shopping Notebook: Digital Store Displays
"Holiday Shopping Notebook: Digital Store Displays"
NEW YORK – Gone are the days when animatronic elves were as technologically sophisticated as department-store windows got during the holidays. This year New York retailers are deploying high-tech spectacles to grab shoppers' attention.
At its flagship location, Bloomingdales is assembling 100 digital screens of different sizes into a mosaic, making its debut Thursday. Together the monitors will form one image: a computer-generated animation of a dreamy winter landscape.
Saks Fifth Avenue enlisted the help of an "experiential" marketing agency to spice up its exterior. At its Fifth Avenue store, starting Monday, a digital projector periodically will beam a six-minute show onto the building's facade. In it, snowflakes and bubbles pirouette to a remixed version of "Carol of the Bells" and interact with the architecture, with bubbles getting "stuck" under windowsills and snow piling up on them.
"We're going for the wow factor, the 'How did they do that?'" said Terron Schaefer, Saks' chief creative officer.
Fifteen blocks downtown, Macy's has computerized its windows so each one is a mini theatrical show with scene changes, lighting, video and voiceover. Hidden in each set are small LCD screens showing scenes within a scene. (For instance, you'll see a character decorating a tree through a tiny window.) To create the animation, they shot digital video of intricate figures made from paper.
"It's a combination of the artistry of paper and the high technology that really makes it special," said Paul Olszewski, director of windows.
Lord & Taylor, which pioneered the animated window display back in 1938, is hewing to tradition. On Monday, its New York flagship unveiled twelve mechanical tableaus illustrating Christmas traditions. The sets, weighing up to 2000 pounds, were built by hand in a workshop under Fifth Avenue, hauled up to ground level and, in the "unveiling" ceremony, raised up on hydraulic lifts while a children's choir sang. If it was passe, the delighted crowd didn't seem to mind.