The Visual Merchandiser (or V.M.) is a professional who deals with communication through the visual element. In other words, he is the one who transforms the display of a shop window or corner of a shop or any other business into a sales tool, taking care of designing and realising the right set-up that gives value to the shop and its products.
The skills of a visual merchandiser
The answer to those who ask what are the skills of a visual merchandiser lies in a list of well-defined characteristics that are learnt with the right training:
- creativity
- aesthetic sense
- knowledge of trends
- communication skills
- knowledge of business strategies
- dexterity
- problem solving
Training
One should not think that the visual merchandiser is only a creative person. Of course creativity is an important element of this profession and those who possess it innately certainly have a good base from which to start, but it is not enough. To perform this very important role for companies and businesses it is necessary to have a technical training and follow some rules very precise.
The visual merchandiser course organised by IDI has been designed precisely to provide trainees with the best technical and practical preparation, in order to transfer skills that cannot be improvised. In fact, the chosen programme and selected lecturers provide one of the best preparations in the field of visual merchandising.
Subjects to study and deepen to become a visual merchandiser
- Visual Merchandising
- Visual communication
- The psychology of colour
- The store
- Showcase
- Point-of-sale display
- The emotional experience at the point of sale
All these topics are explored in detail in the visual merchandising course by Italian Design Institutewhich today represents an important landmark in the training in the sector.
Fashion retail, a growing world
That of the fashion retail is today a sector that knows no crisis, indeed the figures show that it is always growing. It offers multiple opportunities for employment and professional advancement and represents an attractive, stimulating world in which beauty, creativity and aesthetic sense can be expressed to the full.
Milan, the fashion retail capital
Milan is without doubt, together with Londonthe capital of the fashion retaila cosmopolitan city that dictates Italian style around the world and offers many learning and growth opportunities for Visual Merchandisers. For this reason, IDI has decided to bring its courses to this city, allowing its students to touch and experience the atmospheres of a world that finds its highest expression here. The purely theoretical part is flanked by a very important practical phase that will give students the opportunity to get to know the work of great professionals in the sector.
Visual merchandising as an experience
Far from being today simply a matter of layout, exhibition space designs follow a valuable trend that is linked to a very precise concept, which stems from the intention to offer the user an experience. Maximising the profitability of a space by making the beholder a protagonist and participant in it, in a sort of interactivity between space and user.
Buying is increasingly moving towards a kind of sensory experience, i.e. involving all the senses and no longer just sight as was once the case.
The communication strategy therefore broadens its possibilities of application and experimentation, through new stimuli, which the visual merchandiser must learn to interpret, harmonise and narrate.
