Camera Electronic " We Love Shelving "

Pardon my humour at the expense of the company slogan. It is just lightheartedness at viewing the new display racks at the side and ends of the Stirling Street store. The sight of new shelving systems or storage racks has a tendency to do that to old shop employees. Note: retail sales assistants on holiday go to shops in other cities and either envy them their layout or secretly sneer at them. We cannot help it - it is like a bus driver on holiday taking the bus. The only exception is the Leica boutiques and they are remarkably similar wherever you see them - here's one in the QVB building in Sydney. Magnificant setting but still very Leica Boutique inside. By the way, if you want Leica, save yourself a trip. Buy it here. You have two walls of red 'n black at Stirling or Murray. But onto the back wall - it has lost the old ex-library wooden hutches and is a flash new white metal surface with dedicated attachments and a bright clean finish. As you can see, Saul, complete with tape measure, is setting the thing out to look good. The Profoto lighting equipment that will feature on it is the peak of the lighting world for studio work and finally gets a stage upon which it can be seen well. Likewise the paper and printers over to the side wall. The area has been set up so that you can find the goods you need easily - not scrabbling over disparate products in the hope of getting a set of inks. Shop design is no easy thing to start with and geting a logical flow to the display takes more art and skill that you would think. One can see why big department stores have dedicated teams that do nothing more all year than pull down and put up displays. Sometimes you need to think inside as well as outside the box - the plexiglass enclosure for the Canon lens at the Murray Street Store puzzled me at first as it seemed such an extraneous fitting, but I have been assured that it is very secure and very necessary. Murray Street is a narrower plot and they have to be careful to keep the display streamlined. Last but not least is the humble peg rack. These are sometimes provided by suppliers with advertising on them and sometimes made up by the shop. The ones with the sharp spikes all over that catch you whichever angle you approach from are supplied by Torqemada. They are a love/hate form of merchandising as they subject the goods to a lot of vertical pressure and if the manufacturer doesn't make the packaging strong it can all fall off continually. Thankfully these people do make good, consistent packaging that lets you see what you are getting. And they round the ends of the spikes off. People have probably noticed the increasingly clean appearance of the Murray Street shop. This is in large measure a function of Ricky Packham and Domenic Papalia. They discarded a great deal of spare lumber and organised the upstairs stores and then turned their energy to downstairs. Everyone has benefited. In a way, it is rather cruel of me to go in every so often and switch goods back and forth on them, but then retail trade can be a vigorous sport...but don't tell them that I told you... Uncle Dick