Designed to Sell

The Evolution of Modern Merchandising and Display

Alessandra Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429796630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Designed to Sell presents an engaging account of mid-twentieth-century department store design and display in America from the 1930s to the 1960s. It traces the development of postwar philosophies of retail design that embodied aesthetics and function and new modes of merchandise display, resulting in the emergence of a new type of industrial designer.

The evolution of aesthetics in department stores during this period reflected larger cultural shifts in consumer behaviour and lifestyle. Designed to Sell explores these changes using five key case studies and original archival sources to reveal the link between designers and consumption beyond the design of individual objects. It argues that design is not simply connected to retail consumption, but that it is capable of controlling how and where customers shop and what they are drawn to purchase.

This book contextualises this discussion and brings it up to date for students and scholars interested in design, retail, and interior history.

1 Setting the stage

Design and display at the turn of the century

Through the salesman, the customer learns to see more attractiveness in the commodity, learns new uses for it; in fact, he learns to think of it more highly …. The salesman is the connecting link between the store and its customers. He is the most important factor in the institution.¹

(Paul H. Nystrom, 1914)

Displays and their arrangements laid the foundation for modern merchandising in the twentieth century. Fixture companies and trade publications controlled the conversation around interior display, and in-store sales personnel remained integral to selling success. Between 1900 and 1930, window trimmers began applying their craft to store interiors. Their innovations in window display tactics mirrored larger shifts in merchandising theory and consumer culture. Margaret Maile Petty calls the 1920s and 1930s the peak of show window interest, as window trimmers shifted from away from the merchandise display as such into areas of theatrical invention and artistic expression.² In fact, the first wave of store merchandise and window display techniques overlapped with those employed by the museum industry and organizers of fairs. In aligning display techniques with expositions and exhibitions, department stores elevated cultural associations with objects on display. Placing objects for sale in formats similar to those in popular displays of art and science seen at contemporary museums and fairs increased perceived value of the merchandise. This chapter will explore early twentieth-century theories around nascent conceptions of merchandise display, building up to the sea change of the 1920s while allowing for broader conversation on the evolution of merchandising theories as window trimmers informed the tone of interior display. As we will see, the notion of drawing attention to goods so that a salesperson might sell them to a customer was the very foundation of turn-of-the-century display tactics.

Merchandising at the turn of the century

The evolution of department stores at the turn of the twentieth century compelled retail executives to rethink not only how they did business, but also how they organized and displayed goods in service of generating even more business. At this time, department stores dominated commerce in bustling urban areas; these imposing buildings sometimes claimed an entire city block and towered over ten stories. With notions of excess at the very core, such stores enticed their clientele with spectacular displays that layered merchandise of seemingly endless qualities, thus bolstering notions of spectacle at a time when self-control was valued.³

The department store as we understand it today did not exist before 1880. In the decades that followed, however, the American consumer landscape changed, and before long the department store dominated cities throughout the country. While department stores initially emerged in major European cities, their development in cities and towns across America outpaced growth elsewhere. A shift in the driving forces of American economy paved the way for department stores to flourish, so that American department stores came to be symbolic of the middle-class experience. As Thorstein Veblen notes, company mergers and consolidations led by investment bankers created a focus on “making profits” rather than production of goods.⁴

The rapid rise of department stores necessitated new ways of displaying goods and sparked new conversations on how to best organize and utilize store interiors to sell them. Some of the most influential changes to store policy are credited to Alexander Turney Stewart, a retail mogul who owned some of the country’s largest stores in mid-nineteenth-century New York and helped define new practices adopted by retail at large. Stewart leveraged his massive wholesale business to propel his upscale dry goods store. He introduced shoppers to policies that became standard practice in the industry, including a one-price system as opposed to price haggling, free shopping without the pressure of purchasing, and the opportunity to return goods if not satisfied. From a business perspective, he relied on rapid stock turn and a departmental organization of goods. Louisa Iarocci argues in The Urban Department Store in America, 1850–1930 that Stewart’s story represents a “mythologizing of the retail institution,” whereby retail magnates are credited with inventing major changes when in reality they were simply promoters of those new practices. Stewart, along with other magnates, made these such policies commonplace.⁵ These policies, especially the freedom to browse, are crucial to understanding display practices in the turn of the twentieth century as they cast shopping in a new light.

In the 1870s and 1880s, dry goods stores morphed into department stores, growing rapidly. While earlier stores had fifteen small departments, by the 1890s large department stores might have more than 125, from standard basics, to notions, housewares, furniture, décor, pets, and even groceries. Departmentalization influenced the look and feel of a given store and distinguished it from earlier general stores while also introducing a new way of structuring one’s business and bookkeeping practices.⁶ During this time, department stores became havens for largely white, middle-class, American women. Amenities positioned the stores as places to browse and relax. Their modern architectural feats of steel and concrete construction, elevators, electricity, and plumbing invited curious patrons to visit.⁷ Marshall Fields, for example, was the first large store in Chicago to have electric globes in 1882 and telephone lines in every department in 1883.⁸ Such technological advancements encouraged consumers to absorb the world around them; observation and discovery thus became key developments in merchandising and display.

Above all, selling was the driving force of department stores. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, mass retailers shifted away from manufacturing and wholesale divisions toward a focus on retailing. Department store managers likewise shifted from buying to selling, signified by increased advertising. Retailers worked hard to rid Americans of their guilt around having, wanting, and spending money.⁹

European retailers followed a similar trajectory during this time, although they were slower to diversify their offerings. In 1869, the Bon Marché revolutionized retailing and its economies in France by creating a mass marketplace. Filled with new technology and seemingly endless categories of goods, by 1914 it appeared as though there was little one could not purchase from the store. The Bon Marché and other French stores such as Galeries Lafayette and Les Printemps influenced how American retailers created luxurious goods and spaces for a bourgeois audience. Department stores emerged in other European cities as well, but exclusively in capital cities; their development and growth did not mirror that of the American landscape with regard to department stores becoming a ubiquitous part of urban and suburban life.¹⁰

Many historians have discussed the grandeur of so-called palaces of consumption. These early department stores exemplified the opulent décor that defined the larger turn-of-the-century city stores: huge, monolithic structures with luxurious materials either constructed from the ground up or created by numerous architectural additions. Such stores reflected the dreams of big business, luring shoppers with awe-inspiring architecture and displays.¹¹ French stores such as the Bon Marché and Les Printemps, famous for their promenades and tall atriums, served as inspiration for their American counterparts. A quintessential example is Siegel, Cooper & Co., one of a number owned by Henry Siegel, who wished to create a merchandising empire. Backed by investment bankers, Siegel built his stores to cater to all, housing 50 to 100 departments and offering numerous services.¹² When the store opened in New York City in September 1896, it was the largest of its kind in the world. It occupied an entire city block, loomed six stories high, and boasted 125 departments.¹³ A 13-foot fountain with an allegorical representation of The Republic acted as the defining feature of the main floor. Polished stone columns with carved Corinthian capitals and Classical architectural details surrounded the fountain and extended throughout the main floor. A grand, curved double staircase, reminiscent of a palace, invited shoppers to glide through the space, as if formally presenting themselves to other shoppers.

The architecture alone of these modern-day palaces captivated shoppers’ attention, perhaps even competing with the goods they housed. Standard modes of display at this time paid homage to the idea of spectacle and excess, hoping to provoke consumer desire.¹⁴ Less expensive goods—especially cosmetics, toiletries, and dry goods—covered every available surface in their respective departments. In departments with more expensive goods, however, fixtures did not display the entire range of goods for sale, or sometimes any at all, requiring employees to pull options from closed stock storage to present to customers for inspection.¹⁵ This dichotomy between putting everything on display in some departments and nothing in others set a precedent for display throughout the twentieth century. Striking the right balance between what to display, how to display it, and how much of it to display was the key to increasing sales.

As the twentieth century progressed, so did ideas of what constituted a modern store, along with standard retail practices. Store renovations, meanwhile, illustrated the pressure to keep up with evolving trends. Architects began to lead discussions around retail design and suggested cohesive solutions. Iarocci argues that these conversations solidified the department store’s place in modern America and established retail design as a legitimate discipline.¹⁶ They also validated the input of professional designers in everything from building to layout, thus allowing for a more holistic approach to retail design. In designing spaces with the end goal of selling merchandise in mind, architecture itself became an avenue for sales, and not solely a consumer spectacle. In 1908, John Lawrence Mauran (1866–1933), a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained architect who served as president of the American Institute of Architects, articulated this tension in “The Department Store Plan,” an article for the architectural trade periodical The Brickbuilder.¹⁷ Famous for designing a number of public buildings, including the Grand Leader department store completed in 1906 in St. Louis, Mauran was a leading voice in this discussion. The article is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Setting the stage: Design and display at the turn of the century
• 2. The development of visual merchandising
• 3. Downtown remodeling: Implementing new conversations
• 4. The challenge of efficiency in a specialty shop
• 5. Seeing change: “The personality of a store”
• 6. “Image building” in the shopping center, the 1960s
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index