Council is hosting a series of visual merchandising workshops, in partnership with 'A Creative Space' for local businesses as part of our business support and development plan alongside the current "Support Your Local" Facebook event.
This workshop series will provide practical skills in visual merchandising to improve shop displays. Businesses will then use the skills learnt throughout the series of workshops to redesign their own store displays concluding with a Christmas window competition. One on one mentoring with Jennie will also be available to participants if desired.
Jennie Kelly from A Creative Space will be hosting the first workshop in August. Jennie is an experienced visual merchandiser who has worked with a wide selection of retail clients in Melbourne.
As part of her workshop, Jennie will be demonstrating visual merchandising techniques using low cost materials to improve the aesthetics of a product in a retail display. She will also highlight how visual merchandising is a critical step in the marketing funnel cycle taking prospective customers from product awareness through to sales conversion and brand advocacy.
The first visual merchandising workshop will take place on Monday 17 August at 6pm via a Zoom video conference and local businesses in the shire are welcome to fill in a survey before the event to help guide the content of the workshop to our region's specific needs.
Click here to fill out the survey
Visual merchandising is an important part of retail marketing strategy and helps to build brand awareness and excitement for a product prior to purchase.
Visual merchandising can also be an effective tool in an online space as a means of highlighting a product's aesthetics and features to improve social media engagement and online selling.
Northern Grampians Shire Council Mayor, Murray Emerson, hoped businesses would leap at the opportunity to take part in this workshop.
"This is quite a challenging time for our local retailers and our business team has been working hard to find ways to support them and encourage communities in the shire to shop locally," he said.
"We think this visual merchandising workshop will give them quite a few tips and tools to make their businesses more enticing both from a storefront perspective and also in the online space."
To take part in this exciting workshop, please see the event details on council's website
