John Lewis Christmas window display

Yes - all of us at Peter Jones had the absolute pleasure of unveiling our amazing Christmas windows on the world yesterday, after two whole weeks of being shrouded in darkness and secrecy - and for once, the VM team had nothing to do with it !!

This is the amazing handiwork of the talented people at Chameleon Visual in conjunction with Setsquare Staging. Chameleon are the team responsible for our fabric sail-boats in the Furnishing Fabrics dept. on our Ground floor, and the fabulous giant fabric jellyfish floating above the fabric dept. in our Manchester store, when it opened a few years ago. (photos of them at the end of this piece)

This year, the good people at JL Central considered doing things a bit differently for the two biggest London stores, and contracted Chameleon Visual to create some special window-runs for our Christmas customers' amusement (and ours, it has to be said ) The resulting excitement on the Kings Road yesterday was really something to see - a real buzz was created, with clumps of people excitedly pointing fingers, mobile phones and cameras all the way along our window frontage. We decided to take advantage of this, and had various members of staff stationed with trays of mince pies at various points and a lady with a clipboard noting down comments from passers-by who were happily engaged in conversation by partners who talked about what products the animals were made of, and how they were constructed, and generally answered any questions. Comments were all in the vicinity of 'Amazing', 'Marvellous stuff - well done' and 'Oh my God, this is SO not John Lewis !!' - (we'll assume the lady that said that was happy about it !!)
People were very positive in their reactions, and had largely been stopped in their tracks by the best piece of visual retail theatre they'd seen for quite a while...

From the life-size reindeer made from various bits of Dyson vacuum cleaners, right down to the tiniest woodland creatures - red squirrels made from a coffee pot and some red cappuccino and espresso cups, and a bright green woodpecker made out of green-handled picnic knives, with sewing scissors for its eyes and beak, it's a game of 'Spot the Product' all the way...

One of the best and most imaginative creations are the rabbits, made largely from hair-dryers, along with hair straighteners for ears and hot-brushes for legs, electric shavers for a face, and I think, grey wire coat-hangers shaping the outline of their giant ears !!
As with all these animals, the amount of expression they managed to get into them was astounding, mainly from the poses - a quizzical tilt of the head, or a typical sitting pose, whether alone or in groups, and the interaction with each other is magical !!