Visual Merchandising and Store Design | VMSD.com

Frontgate's first stores bring its catalog to life

By Matthew Hall

Founded in 1991, frontgate spent its first dozen years of existence as a direct marketer, selling its upscale home merchandise via catalogs and on the web. The company's only brick-and-mortar selling environment was an outlet center at its corporate headquarters/national distribution center in suburban Cincinnati offering discontinued or liquidation merchandise.

But that began changing last fall, when Frontgate opened its first retail store, a 10,600-square-foot space in Phipps Plaza, in Atlanta's lively Buckhead district. In March of this year, the company opened a second store at the upscale SouthPark Mall in Charlotte, N.C.

"We're at the point in our growth and evolution where we've achieved the critical mass needed to make bricks-and-mortar a viable third leg in our distribution strategy," says Marvin Cooper, president of Cornerstone Brands Inc.-Retail, Frontgate's parent company.

Frontgate hired Design Forum (Dayton, Ohio) to help create its retail spaces. The result of that collaboration "is essentially a 3-D version of the Frontgate catalog," says R. Scott Jeffrey, Design Forum's senior vp, design and creative innovation.

"We wanted the store experience to be as much like the catalog as possible," Jeffrey explains. "The Frontgate brand is about offering the best-quality products for the home - products you typically only buy once in a lifetime. In the catalog, they wrap stories around the merchandise. So we wanted to create a store environment in which stories can be told."

SELECTIVE ENVIRONMENT

The interconnection between the catalog and retail environment begins at the front entrance, where flagstone flooring, stone pillars and a wrought-iron façade "tell shoppers they are entering a very special environment," says Jeffrey.

Flanking the front entrance are two windows, the opening pages of the store. One features a picture and text related to the "home of the month" that's profiled in each edition of the Frontgate catalog. The other displays a photo of Frontgate founder and president Paul Tarvin, along with a letter in which he highlights some of the seasonal offerings displayed inside.

"Both those elements reflect the catalog content," notes Jeffrey.

Immediately inside the entrance is a central display area where new or seasonal items highlighted in the current catalog are displayed under a rotunda. "The feature display is modeled after the two-page spread at the front of the catalog," says Jeffrey.