Luxury fashion house, Stella McCartney, turned to digital visual merchandising for its Spring Summer 2018 window displays; installing unique video walls in 11 flagship stores across Europe, the US and Asia.
To capture the attention of customers before they enter the store, Stella McCartney, entrusted specialist integrators and digital content developers, Freehand, to deliver innovative digital signage displays from manufacturer, LG Electronics. Each video wall relays content featuring the new collection while addressing environmental messaging in the hope of reducing use of plastic bottle usage.
Freehand has been designing and managing digital signage, visual technologies and AV projects in Stella McCartney stores for a number of years. For the Spring/Summer collection, the McCartney team wanted to invest in digital signage that would not only reflect the brand’s modern and responsible values, but have continuity on a global scale.
Laura Gramston, global head of window design at Stella McCartney comments: “This project was particularly challenging, due to the delivery of the screen mosaic solution to stores on different continents and time zones. Freehand provided valuable support to our local integration partners to ensure we launched on time and synchronized with Fashion Week”.
Taking a new approach to the standard 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 videowalls for this project, a combination of different display sizes are configured into a mosaic formation. The 11 video walls spread across continents comprise of 59 displays from LG’s SM5KD range in sizes 32” – 55” hung in both landscape and portrait. LG was selected due to its consistency of product across international markets, meaning that one sole specification could be applied to each store. The displays were chosen for their high bright design at 450 nits, meaning they perform well in the high ambient light environment of the store windows.
A total of 83 DataPath FX4-H videowall processors drive the screens and link to 22 media players from BrightSign, projecting an image of innovation, design and individuality, whilst adding depth and dimension to the content.
Mike Fabian, director at Freehand, comments; “We wanted to provide Stella McCartney with a standout digital signage solution for its 2018 Spring Summer collection. It’s a really exciting project and the mosaic tiling creates a stunning effect. Our main obstacle to overcome was the even distribution of the video content across various screen sizes in both portrait and landscape, which were uniquely designed for each shop window.
“Stella McCartney’s content was filmed in landscape so we required clever editing to ensure messages appeared on the screens. We worked with Neon Circus, a fabrication company, whose design app allowed us to design accurate configurations, and utilise the LG screens in every country to deliver consistency of the hardware. The DataPath processors and BrightSign media players work in unison and allow us to continue maintaining of all the screens globally, remotely and with ease.”
