The Great Village
Coming up with new Christmas displays year after year can become quite trying. You want the merchandise to look fresh and new, you want to accentuate the current trends and you want it to be creative. However, as each year passes, it is not always as easy as consumers think it is.
One garden center I visited this past holiday season came up with one of the most innovative ideas I have seen. Village Green Home & Garden in Rockford, Ill., has taken its name to a whole new level for the holiday season. Throughout the entire store, employees painted, built and designed an entire “village” for the holiday season. It was like walking into a little, old French town with a wine and cheese shop, a tea emporium, a clockmaker and so much more. It made a simple greenhouse look like it was from a past era. I half-expected women to be walking around the corner in bustled skirts and huge hats.
Village Green didn’t just create these storefronts for the look, there was merchandise in each “store” that fit the sign. The teashop held all sorts of teas and tea accessories; the wine and cheese shop had a number of good wines and gourmet cheeses. There was a lot of variety in this one garden center, and it was sectioned off appropriately. To make the scene look even more authentic, there were artificial trees outside of the stores along the “cobblestone paths,” so it really made you feel like you were walking through a village.
I asked one of the employees how much work it took and why they only did this village during the holidays, and he simply said, “It doesn’t matter how much work it takes, the customers love it and come in specifically to see it.”
It is quite true. Village Green is kind of in the middle of a lot of farmland in northern Illinois with not many buildings around it. To bring in the customer base the store has, it pretty much has to be a destination garden center. To be that destination, it needs something to draw the customers in, and the village is one great way to do it.
The detail and artwork of the village feel so real and it is fun to walk around. You get to walk from store to store and see what is in each one, and there are a number of things in the village that are not just holiday merchandise. There are hats, scarves, mittens, clocks and so much more. It was really fun watching customers enter the store and instantly walk over to the village and see what it had to offer. People were coming out of almost every little store with something in hand on the way to the cash registers, but not before checking out the next store.
You can really do a lot for the holidays with some wood, paint and a lot of imagination. This garden center proved that fact. If you are traveling through the Midwest during the 2007 holiday season, check out Village Green’s village and see how your pocket books empty and you suddenly feel like you are in a Alexandre Dumas novel all at the same time.
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