Shop Windows Abroad

1895

Ingenious Scheme of Merchants to Attract Attention to Their Wares.

"Europeans don't go in for newspaper advertising to anything like the extent that we do here," said an American recently returned from abroad, "but they take the shine right off Americans for original schemes to attract attention to their shop windows. In London, Paris and the larger cities in Belgium the shopkeepers are continually devising catchy advertisements. Shoe dealers, hatters, safemakers and men in various mercantile lines do the business up best, but the confectioners, pastry men and other small merchants are not a long way behind them. A shoe dealer in Brussels, who makes a specialty of a waterproof shoe, keeps a pair of the shoes standing in a pan of water in his window all day long. The water comes just up to the top of the soles, and the public are respectfully invited at all times to step up and feel the inside of the shoes and see that they are perfectly dry.

Another shoe dealer in London made a specialty of shoes for bus drivers, and his greatest claim for them was that they were unusually warm. He kept a pair of shoes imbedded in a cake of ice in his shop window, and any one could walk in and feel the inside of them and see that they were warm. A hatter in Antwerp who manufactures a waterproof silk hat keeps one of them in his shop window suspended over a pan, with a stream of water running over it. I never passed this store once without seeing a crowd of people standing in front of it, and I don't doubt that this scheme brought him many a customer he would not have otherwise had.

"In Paris a firm of safemakers employed two men to stand in the window of their place all day and hammer on the lock of one of their safes with huge sledge hammers. The novel designs that confectioners and pastry cooks get up and put in their windows attract the attention and admiration of all foreigners. Every confectioner in Paris who goes in for window advertising at all has a big Eiffel tower of candy in his window, but fine as the Parisian displays are they are not nearly so handsome as those in Brussels. The amount of cake and candy which is wasted in window decoration in the big Belgium cities is amazing. I can't see what use the sweets can be after the things are pulled apart, and certainly no one can have any use for a huge castle or figure made out of cake and candy unless it is used as a centerpiece on a banquet table.

"I have noticed in New York of late a tendency among small retail dealers to emulate the foreigners in this matter of window advertising. A Broadway shoe dealer is advertising his waterproof shoes like the Brussels merchant." — New York Sun.