The recent Tanglewood autumn window display competition saw more than 100 dealers dressing their main showroom windows to enter.
The competition was wholly designed to invigorate the store’s footfall either directly through people noticing the window and popping in to try the product or through Tanglewood’s social media which put the images of all entrants on on different platforms in order to to attract people who maybe didn’t know they had a nearby store or had simply fallen out of the habit of shopping locally.
The winner was Plectrums, Pen,s & Paint in Folkestone which won £1000 worth of Tanglewood instruments.
Owner Mick O’Donoghue said: “I must admit I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the Tanglewood display competition. Retailers generally regard anything that interferes with day to day running with alarm and Plectrums Pens and Paints is no different.
“However, with a little thought I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to have a few guitars in the window with a seaside theme. I mean, sit one on a deck chair and there you go. Little did I realise that, once started, these things have a way of taking control of one’s life!
“OK, I borrowed the deck chair from a retro shop and my brother-in law said he had some driftwood and large shells in his garden. We started to build and before long realised we were actually having fun! We had a pretty nice display going with Banjo Grandad, Father Twelve-string and Ma Parlour, with ukulele kids dotted about.
“And then someone, (and if I ever remember who, grrrr), uttered, ‘You know it would look great with sand and seaweed’. My response was, ‘But the shop will smell like a Fishermans armpit!!’
“Even so, suddenly we were trudging back and forth along Folkestone’s Creative Quarter High Street with bags of sand, pebbles, and discarded fisherman’s nets..
“It looked great! Half the town turned up to see the nutters who were building a beach in their shop window and the amount of people who wanted to know how we were doing in the competition multiplied daily. It certainly put us and Tanglewood on the map which for a small seaside town, Folkestone, was great news and good business. I was right, though, the shop did smell like a fisherman’s armpit.”
