10/11/97 Pittsburgh Business Times

Mary Margaret Stewart gives her sparse but artfully designed front window credit for attracting customers to her year-old clothing shop, Iman B.

Proximity to a traffic light gives her the added boost of a captive audience, albeit temporarily.

"That's my advertising," said Ms. Stewart. "People stop and come in out of curiosity." (more about Ray Sokolowski below)

For the small retailer who can't afford to splurge on advertising, the display window is a primary marketing tool. It is an on-site advertisement, bulletin board and sales flyer, sometimes all at once, with the sole goal of making customers walk through the door.

Window space is valuable, no matter how big the retailer. Cosmetics and fragrance companies lobby for prime space at Downtown department stores like Kaufmann's and Sak's, which attract a lot of foot traffic. Lancome once handed $10,000 to the Joseph Horne Co., to be spent at the store's discretion on decorative window trappings to plug a new face cream.

Dean R. Manna, who heads the Robert Morris College marketing department, said storefronts have to be very "personal in nature" to attract customers.

"If you're dealing with an exclusive shop that sells upscale clothing, they'd have to put together an appealing image style of presentations," he said.

Small retailers often put a loss leader in the window to attract customers, he said. The loss leader, an item discounted so deeply that profit is often lost, would ideally be placed in the back of the store so customers have to pass through racks of higher priced merchandise.

"For any kind of business, there's a limited number of signals that the public sees," said Rick Landesberg, president, Landesberg Design Associates, South Side.

"For a lot of these smaller businesses, the facade, including the signs and the windows, send these signals to the public," he continued.

"Whether it's something the owner thought about or not, it still sends a signal. There's a saying in design, `You cannot not communicate.'"

Iman B displays a few sleek, European-style dresses in the window, set off by a dramatic, if inexpensive, background that changes quarterly. For fall, it was a radiant swirl of flame, gold and green leaves, outlined sharply in black.

Shimmering from the window top on sheets of clear plastic, the background enhanced the single elegant gray dress on display, but did not distract the eye.

Ms. Stewart's uncle, Ray Sokolowski, who hangs shows at The Carnegie Museum of Art, handles the design.

"I've had a lot of retail merchants ask who does my windows," she said.

She has also used the windows to alert customers to a summer merchandise sale or if the store would be closed for a few days while she shopped for fabric in France.

The notices are on brown paper, neatly lettered, and placed discreetly on the door or window side.

The Beehive, further down the street, blankets its windows with the latest buzz; it's impossible to see inside, what with the posters and notices of films, lectures, art openings. The only clues to what's within are the shop's name, in jaunty stylized lettering, and the script that identifies it as a dessertery.

It's a proven tactic: By their logos, ye shall shop them. Window displays may change but the name is often the only consistent identifying feature on the storefront.

"I know this sounds esoteric -- it really isn't -- but one of the strongest elements to a good-looking streetscape is typography," said Mr. Landesberg.

"It has nothing to do with spending money or whether a designer was involved," he added. "The quality of letters has a lot to do with how we perceive a place. You don't really break it apart, you just take it in."

Laurie Mizrahi, of Mizrahi Design, thinks businesses can draw customers through the use of color or by enhancing the building's architecture through trim, doorknobs, or silkscreening the name onto the window.

"Because I'm a busy person and have little kids, I'll seldom stop and window shop," she said. "Something has to strike me as unique."

Cafe 61C, a Squirrel Hill coffee shop named after the Port Authority Transit bus that deposits commuters nearby, did exactly that.

"Cafe 61C has retro graphics that are pretty cool," said Ms. Mizrahi. "Made me want to stop in and have a latte."