The best Christmas windows are at John Lewis and Peter Jones

john lewis 01There’s been lots of attention paid to the big retailers’ Christmas Adverts this year, I think blogs have a LOT to do with this as of course we’re all posting the best ones and providing an excellent add-on marketing experience for them! Are we getting a cut of the advertising spend? are we heck…

Whatever…

Today I’d like to go a bit old-school and draw everyone’s attention to the truly splendid Christmas windows from John Lewis and Peter Jones. They are absolutely spectacular and that is not something one normally says about John Lewis windows, however much we love the brand.

It’s jolly hard for visual merchandisers to come up with a different take on Christmas, what with it coming every year and then there’s the tussle between doing something ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’. However, John Lewis has done just that with its Hare and the Bear windows, which supports the charming animated advert running on a TV or Blog near you.

john lewis 02A bit of background…John Lewis keeps its window schemes firmly based in product, with each department getting a planned window slot throughout the year. This makes for informative, well executed but rarely super-creative windows. Nothing wrong with that.

john lewis 07

john lewis 09But something amazing has happened with this year’s scheme, implemented by visual concept company Chameleon Visuals, the product has morphed into a menagerie of quirky animal characters, from armchair bears to hummingbirds made from orange handled scissors, to reindeers made from Dyson floor sweepers. The window is cleverly still all about product, but by sprinkling creative fairy dust over things, run of the mill items magically take on a new persona. My favourite are the spatula owls…and the penguins made from lemon squeezers and kettles!

john lewis 03The window stretch at both John Lewis Oxford Street and Peter Jones Sloane Square are full of charm and gentle humour and I challenge anyone to walk passed without smiling…

Turkeys from flannels and towels? Genius….

john lewis 06The brains behind the animals is the visual genius and Maker of Things (her words) Billie Achilleos, who was responsible for these lovely Louis Vuitton charmers a while back, too…

billie achilleos

john lewis 05Christmas windows are always worth diverting for and much work and planning goes into the most important windows of the year, these must have ben such fun to work on.

john lewis 11For a behind the scenes peek into how the animals were constructed and the windows implemented check out the video below.

So well done John Lewis, Chameleon Visuals and Billie Achilleos, you get The Women’s Room Best Christmas WIndows of 2013!

Images from Wendy’s Journal and Billie Achilleos

3 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *