As the Christmas Sales draw to an end, what are retailers on London’s Oxford Street doing to banish the winter blues and usher in the new shopping season? John Ryan reports.

The Sale season has been a long haul. For many retailers it started in November with ‘selective’ discounting (aka a mini-Sale). This was followed by the usual Christmas push-cum-panic and ended up with the real Sale that seemed to have begun even before the flames on the pudding had been extinguished.

Now it’s the new season proper and, although there are doubtless some retailers who would have liked to have got cleaner during the few weeks when customers piled into the shops once more in a search of a bargain, enough is enough and it’s time to call time on the Sale.

This is the moment when the retail industry in general and fashion retailers in particular decree, via their windows, that the new season has arrived. In less sophisticated times, this used to mean a flood of T-shirts into the shops in summer colours that had little chance of selling, as the mercury continued to hover around 0°c.

These days, however, new season can mean anything from marginally lighter weight fabrics to the same garments based on a less intense and frequently more pastel-looking palette.

The one thing that seems to unite purveyors of the new season is that if red means Sale, then the default colour to tell shoppers that things are changing is green.

The shift of seasons is about informing consumers of the necessity to get shopping in order not to be caught out, rather than the more usual creation of desire - that’s the theory anyway.

Edited, Topshop

Edited, Topshop

Edited, Topshop

Topshop’s pick of the pops collection is given an almost standalone shop unit as part of the Oxford Street flagship.

The effect is an offer that is almost totally discrete from what’s on show in the main store.

This is reinforced by the use of a visual merchandising scheme that is separate from Topshop and which also makes an almost oblique reference to new season, spring, rebirth and suchlike in the light-coloured wood that is used in the slatted screens that are the window backdrops and to spell out the word ‘Edited’ in 3D.

This looks remarkably like the kind of thing that might be done by the likes of Urban Outfitters or Anthropologie rather than Topshop. And there is a semi-hand-made quality about these window displays that will indicate to shoppers that this is a more premium range than in the main Topshop store. What you see is what you get at Edited.

Uniqlo

Uniqlo

Uniqlo

The Japanese retailer touches all the bases with its new collection windows. Green banners are plastered across the glass, informing shoppers about the shift in attitude and the change of merchandise. And in truth, this is probably just as well - as far as styling is concerned there is little to differentiate what has just arrived from what preceded it.

That said, discerning lovers of the lightweight Uniqlo puffa-style jackets will notice that the colour palette has changed and, given the relatively low price of the articles, there might be a perceived need to enhance the wardrobe.

These are very simple, in-your-face windows but the point is immediately made and the revolving plinth on which the mannequins are posed does mean more bangs for your window-viewing buck, which the retailer no doubt hopes will result in correspondingly longer dwell times.

Adidas

Adidas

Adidas

The German sports brand is wise to the fact that green equates to new in the retail visual lexicon, and it has created a simple window that plays upon the fact. A crowd in a football stadium hold up green and white boards that, when viewed en masse, spell out the word ‘new’.

This is as elemental as it gets - the usual supplementary words that follow this tend to be ‘collection’, ‘season’ or ‘ranges’, but Adidas has eschewed such frippery to good effect.

A simple graphic with a couple of dark tracksuited mannequins either side of it, each of which has a green badge stating ‘new’, is all that is required.

This is quite possibly the most minimalist new season treatment on the whole of Oxford Street and it serves
to show that simple schemes can really punch above their weight when it comes to getting shoppers through the doors.

There is a sense that a good idea will generally trump an expensive window scheme. Adidas shows how.

Bershka

Bershka

Bershka

At the time of writing, Zara may still have had Sale windows but Inditex stablemate Bershka was in full new-season mode. The windows of its store, just to the east of Oxford Circus, linked the real with the virtual world.

The main window’s principal image was of a model called Charlotte Free, the new face of Bershka, posing in the Californian sunshine. This certainly did look odd in the context of a day when more snow was forecast for London. Nonetheless, in front of the graphic, which worked as the backdrop to the window, was an arrow attached to the glassline. This was of the kind that you would normally click on to get a YouTube video to work and next to the main window was a series of screens that showed the scenes from which the backdrop image was taken.

The window was all about summer and a statement of intent by Bershka about the fact that it is as comfortable in the real as the online world.

A real new-season window scheme of the kind that might ready shoppers for what’s to come.

Selfridges

Selfridges

At present, Selfridges has one of those visual merchandising schemes that takes a theme and then blasts it across each of the many windows that form the storefront. ‘Blasts’, however, in this context, is an inappropriate verb as the thing that unites each window is the sound of silence.

A small, curated, semi-discrete space has been created in store in the Concept Shop, with a larger one downstairs in the Ultralounge, both aimed at fostering, and selling, the idea of a quieter life. The tone is set by the windows however, which have everything from jars of Marmite - much of which you recognise by their shape, but from which the brand noise, in the form of words, has been removed - to a house in cutaway form, to show noise reducing padding in the walls.

In doing all of this, Selfridges has unveiled a different take on the new season. After the hubbub of the festive period, the retailer’s message is to slow down. This might be somewhat counter-intuitive but, on the other hand, it is attention grabbing.

John Lewis

John Lewis

John Lewis

As well as being changeover time for fashion, the advent of the New Year (and this lasts through much
of January) is, of course, also the point at which resolutions are made - of the kind that are usually broken before February.

Perhaps with this in mind, several of the main windows along John Lewis’ Oxford Street flagship’s frontage are filled with entreaties to exercise.

With large, yellow backdrops to each of these windows, emblazoned with the message ‘Start the new year’ with ‘a goal’, ‘a stretch’ or ‘just one mile’, the aim is clear - get them to think lean while they might still be keen, or keen enough.

Practically, this means an array of items aimed at helping the over-indulgent shed the pounds or just keep trim for the year ahead. This scheme has a limited shelf life, but on the other hand it does well in terms of tapping into the feeling of January cleansing and general austerity.