Visual Merchandising is a marketing practice that uses floor plans, colour, lighting, displays, technology, and other elements to attract customer attention. Its ultimate purpose is to use the retail space to generate more sales. Customers want to feel that shopping in your store is a pleasurable experience. They want to be excited by the range of merchandise on offer.​ At Creative Download, our wealth of knowledge and hands-on experience will ensure that your store message gets across to your customers. Visual Merchandising is more than being creative. It is a commercial driver for your business in the need to create exciting shops/stores driving sales through Visual Merchandising, Store Layout, Fixtures, Product Categories/Product Adjacencies, Signage & Ticketing.

Your windows are the face of your store. They are the cheapest form of advertising, one of the most important elements of your store. It is paramount to ensure that the passing customers stop, look and enter your store. ​Our studio is an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ when it comes to display props and devising cost effective concepts for clients. We believe in recycling wherever possible. The studio is always a hive of activity; building and adapting props, painting through to covering window panels.​ With many of our clients we work 6-8 months in advance to deliver cost effective and eye-catching windows.​

With any new retail outlet, whether that’s a Department Store, Concept/Pop-Up Store or an Independent retail shop on a High Street, it is crucial to ensure that your retail establishment has been professionally planned in terms of layout, zoned product areas, window displays, fixtures, ticketing/graphics through to lighting. There is so much more to running a retail shop than opening the doors on the first day. ​Creative Download has worked on many projects to ensure the retailer has a stunning new store for that all important customer and first impression. 

Whether you are exhibiting at The Spring Fair in Birmingham, Ambiente in Frankfurt or Maison Objet in Paris, there is a growing need to stand out for the crowd.​ Rather like a shop window display, you only get a few seconds to make a potential customer stop and look at your exhibition stand as they walk by.​ Creative Download can help you promote your brand and visual presentation of your merchandise from show dressing to creating stunning room settings.

Creative Download can plan and develop VM Communication Guidelines that is bespoke to your store. ​From the basic VM principles through to a strategy to ensure consistency and a cohesive look that is paramount for the store. Creative Download can also plan and run VM training sessions in order to teach the VM Team and Sales Team the skills to ensure that your store has the highest standards of Visual Merchandising.​

A photographic stylist, or media stylist helps the photographer set the scene for a photograph or shoot to capture the mood, style and atmosphere that the photographer wants. They normally specialise in a particular area such as fashion, food or interior design.​ Our Creative Team style and creates images or video of a product / brand / range which will eventually be used across various marketing platforms: from print ads to social media, websites and press releases.​ Styling plays a really important role in telling a story about your products. It gives your products context, and if done correctly, can put your customers IN the story as they're viewing your images. 

Retail is not just on our High Streets.​

When we think of retail, we automatically think of shops and stores on our High Streets and in various​ shopping malls.​ When we have a family day out to a theme park, museum or visitor attraction, there is usually a retail shop on site. Visitors are a captive audience once inside the attraction and superb store presentation is paramount to create additional revenue.​ The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust have been a client of Creative Download for several years, and we oversee the​ Visual Merchandising/Store Presentation at their sites across the UK.​ The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust was set up by Peter Scott, the son of the Antarctic explorer Captain Scott.​ In 1946 the Wildfowl & Wetlands opened in Slimbridge as a centre for science and conservation. ​WWT now welcomes in excess of a million visitors each year to the Wetlands centres around the UK.

Independent retailers are the backbone of the High Street; they are the heart of the community and the local economy. ​The High Street offer treats – the Saturday morning cappuccino and cake, a new piece of fashion, a gift for the home as well as a pint of milk and a gossip with friends. Creative Download is passionate about keeping retail and our High Streets alive. With soaring rents and business rates, and the increase of on-line shopping, retailers must step up and attract customers back to their High Streets and into their shops. ​Creative Download work with a number of independent retailers who value the importance of using the services of a professional Visual Merchandising business. ​

Although Creative Download is UK based, we have worked on many retail projects overseas. These include China, The Middle East, The US, Europe and Scandinavia. Our commercial experience and knowledge are global and many retail organisations aspire to the ‘Western style’ of Visual Merchandising.​