The best visual merchandising is soon forgotten

Visual merchandising is a fickle partner. One day you’re being praised and admired by everyone, the next, the crowd has moved on. Meantime you’re left with the sense of being yesterday’s news and faced with the scramble to find something fresh and engaging.

Even allowing for the ephemeral nature of retailing, it’s tough to have to keep reinventing and come up with something that will capture shoppers’ roving eyes.

This may go some way towards the feeling of mild anticlimax currently when entering the Anthropologie store on Regent Street. Much less than a year old, when it opened, this was a visual merchandising tour de force. There was a fabric narwhal, life size, columns festooned with blooms created from white bin liners and beds seemingly created from piles of logs.

All gone and almost as if they had never existed. In their place is, well, some rather good VM, but nothing like the same as what it has replaced.

There could be several reasons for this - lack of inspiration, the effective departure of the US VM team who gave the store its initial wow factor, or maybe just the difficulty of following the initial element of surprise.

Whatever the reason, and in spite of the still astonishing vertical garden,  about which so much was written, this is not really the store it was.

At least not at the moment and you have to wonder whether cost might not be involved. The real positive is that the best VM doesn’t necessarily mean huge outlay, just a good idea and unfortunately while the rolls of coloured paper used to create montages on the first floor are fine, they’re not enough.

Time for Anthro’s team to don the thinking caps once more - a great store is in danger of becoming just a good store and that would be a pity.