In this unseasonably warm period of goodwill to all men, there is much to be leant from the way in which Anthropologie is pulling them through doors by the simple expedient of quick-fire change.

It’s only been open a short time and is a complete newcomer to the UK, but a trip on Saturday to Anthropologie was instructive.

The shop was mobbed, mainly it appeared, by Continental shoppers making the most of sterling’s continued weakness – although it was hard not to smile at two very British visitors who commented: “It doesn’t look very English.”

It’s not and is sufficiently different to remain a crowd-puller as we approach Christmas. That said, the thing that really impressed, the internal vertical garden nothwithstanding, was the windows. When Anthropolgie opened, just a few weeks ago, these were filled with used teabags, thousands of them, attached to pieces of cotton suspended from the ceiling.

Collectively, they formed a giant installation of the kind that Damien H or Tracey E might be pleased with, but not the sort of thing that you’d really expect in a shop window. Very impressive, and it must have taken some visual merchandising type days to put together.

Yet in spite of this, all traces of the display have been swept away and in its place, is Christmas. Yes, we all expect retailers to have their Christmas schemes in place by now, but in Anthropologie’s case, to do this so shortly after unveiling its teabag meisterwerk, looks almost like extravagance.

And the new windows are just as eye-catching as what preceded them. Pride of place probably goes to the waistcoated bear whose arms, neck and parts of the face, have been created from a mix of Post-It notes and squares scraps of paper cur from the Financial Times.

The rest of the scheme is beguiling in its apparent simplicity with poles made from birch tree branches, providing the background framework for the scene. As you might perhaps expect from an American retailer, where Holidays are a big number, there is much that is traditional about all of this. But the fact that it’s seemingly been created from odds and ends, does much to act as a curtain-raiser for the interior of this store, where make-do and mend are raised to new heights.

And it’s all been done with consummate speed. In this unseasonably warm period of goodwill to all men, there is much to be leant from the way in which Anthropologie is pulling them through doors by the simple expedient of quick-fire change. Meticulous planning has yielded windows that are conspicuously different from the mass oversized-baubles that characterise the efforts of many rivals this year. Retailers should pay a visit to this store and then keep visiting and revisiting to see how effective frequent change can be.