Amanda Henderson has spent three decades crafting some of Australia’s most theatrical retail environments. Erin O’Loughlin charts her rise from a humble sportsgirl changeroom to the Myer catwalk.
It’s one of those stories that gives hope to despondent university students everywhere: unsatisfied at the end of her first year studying for a Bachelor of Arts at Adelaide University, Amanda Henderson turned her casual weekend job at Sportsgirl into a full-time pursuit.
Twenty years on, she’s the founder and director of consulting firm Gloss Creative, crafting runways, retail windows and other 3D installations for heavyweights including Myer and L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.
With 30 years’ experience in the visual merchandising realm, there are few others who can match Henderson’s capacity to create a retail experience of a truly arresting nature.
As she explains, however, the fashion industry’s understanding of and respect for the power of visual merchandising was in its infancy when she started as a casual fitting room assistant at Sportsgirl in 1980.
“During that time, they obviously didn’t have visual merchandisers, they just put a casual in the window and got them to dress it,” she says. “I used to do that. I thought, ‘oh, this is really fun’. One day, I was walking through the main Sportsgirl and the state manager asked me if I’d like a [full-time] job, so I took it.”
Henderson describes those years working under Sportsgirl director David Bardas as an incredibly creative time.
“[Sportsgirl was] one of the first to really create the theatre of visual merchandising throughout the 1980s,” she says. “I’d make and craft things and brainstorm things and style. It was very much a design-by-doing process.”
It was also where Henderson met Ernst Jost, a fellow Sportsgirl employee she describes as an “incredible mentor” for the 15 years they worked together. “He was an incredible brainstormer. Everyday we’d have brainstorms. He was Swiss, so he’d feed us chocolate every afternoon. He created a fun environment; we always worked very hard.”
The passage of time saw Henderson rise through Sportsgirl’s ranks until she assumed the title of national visual merchandising manager. By the time she left in 1994, the Sportsgirl business had grown to 126 stores. The blossoming of the suburban chain store network brought new challenges.
“All of a sudden, how are we going to make a story in Cairns look the same as the one in Brisbane and Melbourne and Toorak?” Henderson recalls.
In 1994, fellow Australian womenswear retailer Country Road successfully lured Henderson to its ranks, where she worked as general manager of visual merchandising.
Along with Sportsgirl, Henderson believes Country Road is at the forefront of Australian retailers when it comes to investing in visual merchandising.
“They believe in the power of visual merchandising and have done for decades,” she says. “You can see the intellectual property that they’ve grown and developed over that period of time is ingrained in their business, and that’s why they do it with such ease.”
It was Country Road’s move from premises in Collingwood to Richmond that prompted Henderson to think about how she could take visual merchandising beyond its traditional small-scale focus. With a much larger Country Road showroom to dress, Henderson began to think back to the time she spent in Adelaide theatres.
“I had done a lot of theatre in my formative years with Helmut Bakaitis and The Saturday Company … so combining the two, that understanding of a larger space and how it impacts as a theatrical experience, really started to come out in the installations I was doing there. I just felt that I wanted to do something on a larger scale.”
And so, in 2001, Gloss Creative came into being. Over the years, Henderson has designed marquees for Flemington regulars Saab and Moet, events for National Australia Bank and Paspaley, as well as retail windows for Elwood and Sportsgirl, to name just a few projects. Gloss Creative also crafts set designs, runways, floral creations and other projects that involve what Henderson calls “3D design”.
Despite the fashion industry’s evolution when it comes to embracing visual merchandising, Henderson still feels there is some resistance among Australian retailers to the process.
“Sometimes, if they haven’t used VM as a marketing tool before, they can often find it very expensive and really quite hard to do. The skill level required to do a 3D installation, to get it looking good and to keep it up in the store not breaking [occupational health and safety requirements] – it’s hard work.”
Yet Henderson insists there are numerous advantages for retailers who choose to get creative in-store.
“Firstly, installations add a sense of surprise. It’s often not what people expect. Secondly, it’s the way that you can get the customer to feel what you’re about and feel the emotion of the brand. Yes it’s something to look at, but it can often have an undefined feeling about it.
“The fact that it’s temporary too, it has this ephemeral nature which I’m really interested in. I think people understand that and they’re easily taken with it. They believe in it and let themselves imagine about your installation, or become a part of it in some way, just for a few seconds.”
Henderson believes that apart from the work of “one or two” large scale retailers, the best in-store installations in Australia are crafted by independent boutiques. She nominates Husk and Melbourne’s Brunswick Street tenants as examples.
“They can attack it themselves, they can create it themselves, and they’ve got a high level of autonomy to just make it happen.”
The idea that experiential retail is off limits to those without large marketing budgets is also something Henderson questions.
“Sometimes visual merchandising isn’t easy to measure, so people call it expensive when it’s not. You look at companies who create an experience for their customers... that can have a much greater effect on sales in a sense, because people know that if there’s an installation in the store there’s something going on there.
“There’s something happening. And that’s interesting. They know when they go to that store, there will be something to look at or think about.”
As for Gloss Creative’s future, Henderson says she plans to stick with those retailers and marketing managers who are keen to embrace new ideas and understand the power of visual merchandising.
“This is where we want to be. We have never strived to be big, but we’ve always strived to do something new and something different.”
Creating 3D in-store designs: Henderson’s advice
• Have a clear understanding of your brand and what you want to express.
• Think big and think simple. “Think of one idea, and deliver it simply, and you’ll get the impact,” Henderson says.
• Integrate the installation with your existing marketing program. “It’s really important the whole thread is strong... that it’s all one message.”
• Factor the cost into your marketing budget. “You can see the people who never drop it, who have it planned as part of their marketing program, ongoing, year after year. They don’t think it’s expensive. If you do it once or twice, you’ll think it’s expensive.”
• The biggest trend Henderson sees in VM at the moment is the tendency to see familiar things in a new way. “What I’m noticing is the roughness and the rawness and the industrial simplicity of a lot of found objects put together to create something new, is really strong across all of the world: people using familiar objects in an unfamiliar way”.