Camper store designs offer consistency with subtle but effective visual merchandising variations. Their Oxford Street branch is no exception.

Camper consistently manages to take a mass roll-out and then customise it. This is what has been done in the Camper store on Oxford Street and it works well.

Camper, the Spanish retailer and shoe brand, has shops that are always worth a look, if only because while they all have a superficial similarity, they are all different. And, in many instances, they are a response to either locality or to the building that houses the store.

The thing that unites the great bulk of them, however, is a long, low table in the mid-shop on which most of the stock is displayed. After that, all bets are off and, while the stores pass the ‘take the name off the door and you’d still know where you are’ test, there is a greater variety of visual merchandising ingenuity in this chain than in almost any other high street operator.

This branch is on Oxford Street and, while it certainly has the long table that runs from the front of the shop to the back, this is not what will grab the eye. Instead, it is the lightshades that do all the work.

These take the form of lightweight pieces of white clothing – skirts and trousers – which allow the pendant light bulbs inside to provide a diffused source of illumination.

This is, in fact, less about lighting up the space, although that is partially achieved, and rather more concerned with giving shoppers a reason to stop and take a look through the window.  The white of the shades is mirrored by the top of the centre-floor table/plinth, which has a red mosaic tile surround and provides an interesting but essentially neutral platform on which to display Camper’s predominantly dark merchandise.

The best retailers are those that really do things differently at a local level, managing to take a mass roll-out and then customise it. This is what has been done in the Camper store on Oxford Street and it works well.