The seminar was focused on retail specialists of the companies who work in the market of clothes and footwear for children; and it was especially useful for companies’ owners, heads of retail, visual merchandising departments, and architecture and design departments.

Anna Balandina told about the main mistakes made in shop designing:

Mistake #1: Fixed zoning (division of the retail space by immovable partition walls) – it puts serious limits to sales activities and it makes some zones of the shop “cold” and not selling. Every selling zone should not only have its own name: in every zone there should be an Emotional Magnet made with the help of Visual Merchandising instruments: POS materials, differentiated styles of the zones, creative navigation, decorative VM elements, and emotional zones of Active Buying.

Mistake #2: Ineffective shop equipment: it is immovable, fixed; or, initially incorrect levels of shelves and racks. The wall-mounted shop equipment must be transformable. It is necessary to study the rules and the principles of the VM and to install the fronts, the shelves and the racks at commercially correct levels.

The main rule of presentation of a fashion collection for children is its maximal comprehensiveness. The entrance zone has a powerful selling potential, and it cannot be left empty. It should be an image one, it should reflect the DNA of the brand, its unique character; it is a magnet zone, it attracts the customers, and it sells seasonal goods.

Mistake #3: The entrance zone is emotional but not selling. Every square meter of the sales zone must work and sell effectively. The design of the shops for children and the concepts of their display windows should be emotional.

Both emotional and commercial parts of the design projects are very important. The display windows are the main ground for emotional VM. The shop-window concept should serve as an inflow to the sales ground. The entrance zone gives priority to the collection presented in the shop-windows.

Besides the above issue, Anna told us how the shop-windows sell; whether it is necessary to invest into shop-windows, or to save on shop-windows in the shops for children; what approaches work in modern design of the shops for children.

The seminar demonstrated the slide deck with examples of existing foreign and Russian brands of clothes for children and of other goods for children, and of the world trends in shop design.

The participants listened with great attention and interest. In the end there was an active dialogue between Anna and the participants who asked questions linked to the topic of the seminar.