With apologies to Jack Kerouac, I'm on the road yet again. This time with a group of visual merchandising students from LIM College (New York), where we like to extend the learning experience beyond the classroom, and in this case, beyond the border. So we loaded a bus with 13 students, one alumna and three faculty members and headed north of the border to Montreal. As we drove through the Hudson River Valley, we delighted at the spring weather that had finally broken through the long, cold winter. The foothills of the Catskills were coming to life with verdant happenings and colorful blooms.

Most don't realize how beautiful upstate New York is. As visual merchandisers, we always have our aesthetic-radar turned on, so I couldn't help think about Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church and the other painters of the Hudson River School who documented the beauty of this part of the country. As we continued north past Lake George, whose sensuous mysteries were captured through the eyes of Georgia O'Keefe, we began our climb up the daunting Adirondack Mountains. After five hours on the bus, we were rambling through the Champlain region of New York. The Canadian border was not far off.

Upon arriving in Montreal, our hosts, JP Metal America (Montreal), took us to dinner in the old section of the city where the lilting dialect of the French speaking inhabitants of “La Métropole du Québec” and the period architecture had the students thinking they were in a town in northern Europe. The next day Bobby Ciricillo, vp of sales and marketing for JPMA, toured us through his company’s 1.1 million-square-foot fixture manufacturing and design facility. Our students were wide-eyed and enthusiastic as they hung onto Ciricillo's every word — some taking copious notes.

Giving back and contributing to the next generation of visual merchandisers and designers is an integral part of our industry and clearly a way to ensure its future. On our tour of the JPMA facility, students learned everything from the functionality of bevel folds, the beauty of nickel plating, the purpose of powder-coating and varying welding techniques and standards. The experience has clearly given them a leg-up as they endeavor to launch their professional careers.

One of our mantras at the college is, “If you’re not thinking globally, you're not thinking.”

A visit to our neighbors to the North revealed the nuances of a culture not unlike ours, but distinctive, nonetheless. The hockey playoffs were in full swing, something called “poutine” seemed to be the local fast-food favorite and the stores on Montreal's renowned Saint Catherine Street clearly had a Canadian flavor.

After our tour at the facility, we headed out to see some retail in the City of Saints, including The Hudson's Bay, Holt Renfrew, Simons and Ogilvy. One of the highlights was a stop at Roots. Many of the students were working on the conceptual redesign of a Roots store in our Store Design class and this cultural emersion and firsthand look at the retailer’s branded environment helped the students understand the cultural aspect that is so important to any design process. Retail, after all, is a reflection of who we are. So a bus ticket, seven hours and a gracious host was all it took to take an education in visual merchandising out of the classroom and across the border.

Eric Feigenbaum is a recognized leader in the visual merchandising and store design industries with both domestic and international design experience.  He served as corporate director of visual merchandising for Stern’s Department Store, a division of Federated Department Stores, from 1986 to 1995. After Stern’s, he assumed the position of director of visual merchandising for WalkerGroup/CNI, an architectural design firm in New York City. Currently, he serves as the chair of the Visual Merchandising Department at LIM College (New York), and was also an adjunct professor of Store Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In addition to being the New York Editor of VMSD magazine, Eric is also a founding member of PAVE (A Partnership for Planning and Visual Education). Currently, he is also president and director of creative services for his own retail design company, Embrace Design.