This is a cute little montage of our Visual Display team creating some signage for our stores using stencils and spray-paint! Look forward to seeing the fruits of their labor in stores soon! The cool song is called Ride an Old Paint, by Pete Seeger!
Give our newest store playlist a spin! It's really upbeat and fun! Enjoy!
Check out our latest playlist - the March playlist for the stores! I hope you'll like it as much as we do! Enjoy!
This morning I wandered into the Display Team's room, and found them working on this sweet little project!
Turns out they are thinking of creating big rugs to hang on the walls in the stores. (Which would be awesome.)
So today they have been creating lots of little mini-rugs, to try out different techniques and see what looks best and allows for the most detail.
They are so cute! Next time I wander into that room, you can bet I'm going to be asking for rug-making lessons... ;)
Some of the newest fitting room art from out Carlsbad, CA store! Which one is your favorite? I love the last one...
We just opened our store in Palo Alto, CA! Here's a few pics. Come check it out...
Stanford Shopping Centre
#313-A
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 462-1986
We first posted photos of the sequined canvases when our NYC store opened. Now they are part of all of the FP stores' spring display. A reader commented asking how to make these, and one of our talented display girls had some great advice I wanted to share with everyone.
For our proto, our designer actually hand sewed each sequin on by hand, and then left a space for the screen printed flower applique. She does not recommend doing that yourself! Luren suggests going to a fabric store and buying a small amount of sequined fabric, maybe the stretchy variety. This could be a little expensive, so another great alternative would be to find some sequined wonder of a dress at a thrift store for a couple of dollars. That way you would be recycling material and not spending much $$. The fabric can them be fixed onto a frame of canvas stretchers and decorated as you like.
Hope that helps! If you end up making the project, you should send me the photos and I'll post them on the blog! Just leave your email address in a comment and I will get in touch. Happy crafting!
Here's the latest from our display team. The stores are decorated to complement our "I Want Candy" concept and the February catalog shot in India.
Spring Display is sparkly and colorful, with sequin canvases, neon lotus lanterns floating along the walls and above the tables, and hand-printed gauze fabric yardage draped on the walls. The front window's mannequins are surrounded by a swirl of floating bright blossoms. The stores feel bright and magical and each sequin canvas catches your eye with a unique floral print appliquéd on a bed of shimmering sequins. What do you think???
Wondering what the display looks like after the new year? Trans is the term we use for the short periods between major seasons, like a transition. So right now we are in between holiday and spring. You have to catch this display in the stores quick! It's only up for a few weeks. Don't you love the hammock??
Our creative director for the display team saw these plastic hanging cane baskets at an airport gift shop in Hong Kong and loved them. So she placed a large order to have shipped to the US. Each basket came with a little cookie inside. Free People had no use for the cookies, and it would have been a nightmare to get them through customs, so we had it arranged that the cookies be donated to an elderly folks home in Hong Kong.
We got some comments asking for more details of our giant crochet tree display. Here you go! This is the prototype tree our display team made in their workspace at the home office.
The visual team crochetters worked from the top down, starting with a styrofoam ball, crochetting around it and then down, connecting to big rings as we went. Then we crochetted garland to drape on the tree, and crochetted around little styrofoam balls to be "ornaments." Then we had to chop the rings in quarters, folded the tree up, and sent it to india to be reproduced. As you can see from the pictures of the final one in the stores, they're all a little different. But it looks great and is a wonderful handmade treasure.
The Free People stores are filled with holiday cheer. Check out this years decorations..
The bike is decked out, of course.
This year was all about the silver mirrored garlands and tinsel, and sparkly winter creatures.
Our favorite piece, the crocheted tree!
I'm sure you all have Halloween candy on your minds, but there is a different kind of candy spirit going on here. The Free People elves have been working hard to prepare for our holiday store displays. Here are some pictures of the progress of the gingerbread houses being made here in the office. Lots of girls from diffferent departments have stopped by and are helping out the display team since everyone is swamped in holiday spirit! Take a peek at the festive beautiful houses, and the candy that abounds as supplies.
The accessories designers have been the number one culprits in stealing candy. Since they're accessories designers, the display team told them it would be like them coming over and eating their sequins, sparkle trims and Ipod holders. They still have a sweet tooth though.
More to come as the holdiay displays get installed in the stores!
I posted the video of our first Urban Outfitters Inc. art installation a little while back (check it out here).
The latest artist exhibiting in Building 543 (the Urban Inc. common building hosting our restaurant, book shop, gym, etc) is also a Free People girl. Luren works on our display team and is an amazing artist in her free time.
This installation was originally titled "One Wall is an Edge." It addresses the idea of creating a nomadic but holistic environment for yourself to move in. The yurt is a nomadic shelter, meant to be put up in a few hours, made hospitable, lived in, and deconstructed to move to a different place. The painted backdrop completes the illusion of creating a new environment for the yurt dweller. This is a fantasy place for being far away while grounded in a common routine. It is an escape to an exoticized space, yet it is made of common materials around us all the time: plastic, PVC, zip ties, canvas and wood. Decontextualized from its usual location on the planes of Central Asia, the yurt and its landscape act as an object of escapism and as a space for contemplation and surprise.
A little about Luren... She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with the department of Textile Design. She has been working within the scale of environment creation through interior design and textile design, as well as installation. Her interests in the decorative arts lie mainly in the intersection of the surreal and the conventional. She is currently living and working in Philadelphia with Free People making artwork for new stores and designing seasonal displays.
We received a message from blogger vintage thrift & craft. The author and her 14 year old daughter, Paige, saw some of our fitting room artwork on our blog. Paige was inspired to a mural of her own! Her mom let her take over a wall of their hallway, and this is what she came up with. Awesome, right?
As promised, here are photos of the new fall store display. The team made these trees out of chicken wire, fabric and yarn.
One of the main display concepts were these fabric covered bricks. The display team made about fifty of them in the home office and the rest were stitched in India. The bricks serve as an interesting visual element that are stacked to make different structures and patchwork effects. They contrasted the bricks with lucite boxes used to house the vignettes. The large shapes in the window below are large medallion cutouts from felt and fleece. They were somewhat inspired by the effect of postage stamps. What do you think of the new display??? Go check it out in the stores!
Just wanted to share a few photos I snapped in the display team's workshop. Doesn't that first picture look like the most girly hardware store you've ever seen? So out of all this madness comes our beautiful displays. Our fall store displays are being installed now, so I'll get you some photos and the inside scoop later this week!
On Monday, we opened our newest store and the first store ever on the west coast! Visit us in Del Amo! The store design is completely new. Our designers planned this store to reflect the California aesthetic and lifestyle, making the space more airy and "modern". Even the store front is a new design.
The store front is inspired by a vintage kimono print. We'll be using this same print on other store fronts, but for this store we had a mural artist actually paint the print. I talked with one of the girls from our display team that was responsible for finding the mural artist. She seriously found him on muralist.com! The internet rules. Anyway, check out the store!
Last week, the Free People display team, the merchandisers, and the retail teams were all busy setting up our new store in Greenwich, Connecticut! You should definitely go visit the store and see how it came out, but here are some "behind the scenes" of the preparation.
The above photos are of the finished art in the fitting rooms. The display team hand paints, draws, stencils something unique in each room. Don't they look amazing???
And here we have the transportation of the giant yarn balls. Looks like a comfy ride...
This is the first Free People store to have this cool new cash-wrap. (Don't mind the mess, remember this was from setting up the store) The little windows are filled with treasures found in Hong Kong. Some have flowers, stationary, and other crazy sparkly Chinese decorations. One of our sweater designers, Amy, lives in Hong Kong and she found all of these incredible bits for us. She said she sourced them in these tiny hole-in-the-wall shops and alley ways. She had lots of fun finding them and it was so different from working on the sweaters. Thanks to Amy, the cash-wrap looks awesome! Go check out the store for yourself!
The new store display was designed around 3 different materials: a mix of bamboo, cotton rope, and grass mats. The grass mats are from India and made of strips of bamboo. The patterns were inspired by fabrics our Visual Director bought in Tanzinia on a safari and some fabrics the accessories team designed with. The display team reinterpreted the prints into these big crazy versions and hand painted the mats.
The rope was ordered in bulk (72,000 feet!) and half was hand dyed by the display team in their workspace. You should see the floor now, it's turned green from all the dyeing! They got smart and had the other half professionally dyed by a company in Philly.
They had the bamboo delivered from India, and when it arrived it was totally covered in mold! The display team hand bleached and scrubbed every piece. These girls work hard for their displays...
And they get thirsty while they work, so don't mind the mess. But their work totally pays off, right? It looks so beautiful.
The display team describes the inspiration as a light, ephemeral glimpse of a spring day. They had a crazy three weeks putting all of this together and it came out really amazing.
One of the display girls hand painted all of the ballerinas. She did similar paintings of these girls (sans tutus) for another display and the paintings are currently decorating our offices.
The tutus and garland samples were made and developed by our team here and then one of them went to India to work on production.
The paper garlands are stapled to the ceiling. There are about 200 strands of paper garland in each store.
The hanging ballerina's in the tutu's are just hung on dummy busts from the store and hung on chain attached to the ceiling. The ladies are wearing Free People camis with their tutus.
Speaking of store display (see entry below), here is our new spring window display! As you can see, ballerinas play a role in this show. Look out for the next post with more detailed pictures and inspiration info...
Clicked onto etsy today and saw this collection of map inspired items. The collection was handpicked by theseawithin. I especially love the origami butterfly. The collection reminded me of our travel theme for the store display and our embellished maps.
I finally got some photos of the new store display! (scroll down a few entries to see what it looked like when the team was creating it) The inspiration started with our "Trip to Bali" theme for the last part of our Holiday collection. So a lot of elements of the display are Bali inspired, but then they expanded that idea to a broader travel theme. The above world map was embellished with sequins, glitter, even coffee beans...
These collages made of post cards and travel brochures decorate the walls.
And these tissue paper flowers were made by the display team. The idea was inspired by a flower offering ceremony performed in Bali.
The multi colored flags of dyed muslin were also inspired by decorations for festivals in Bali. You might recognize these flags from the holiday catalog or from the background in some product photos on our website.
Here is the front window display. The glare makes it a little difficult to see, but they used these really amazing fringed umbrellas, also used in the holiday catalog shoot.
These shots are from our store in Suburban Square right outside Philly. This store has an amazing skylight that the display team has made even more beautiful with flower garlands from India. If you're near a store, go check it out for yourself!
Happy New Year! New year means new store display. These photos are from the display team's work room as they were preparing for the new concept. They install everything tonight, so hopefully I'll have some pictures tomorrow so you can see what all of this mess yields. A clue... the inspiration was based on traveling...
Do you live near a Free People store? A wide selection of our holiday display will be for sale after New Years! Visit the stores and ask for the details. I think you need a 150 pound teddy bear to keep you company in your studio apartment...
Our display team just finished installing the holiday display at the Free People store in Paramus, NJ and it looks awesome. The rest of our stores will be decorated over the next week, so if you live near one you should definitely pay a visit to see what they've done. (find store locations here)
The inspiration was vintage wintertime and they were looking at lots of vintage Christmas images, toys from the 1950's and even found this crazy chair made of stuffed animals. So they got really into the stuffed animals and decided on this huge 150 pound teddy bear for the front window. The bear's patchwork was done by hand by our display team here in Philly.
Each store will have an "advent" calendar, also hand painted by our display team. Each day the store employees will open a window or door to reveal a hidden picture. There was supposed to be chocolate behind each door, but there were some technical difficulties. The team left the store staff a package of chocolates that they can eat each day instead.
Some painted skis and ice skates...
and the wall of cookies, also made by the display team.
Our display team has been doing some amazing art inside the fitting rooms of our boutiques. Each one is different and done using paints, markers, stencils and stickers. Check out the photos above of walls from our latest store location in Boston's Prudential Center.
If you've ever been in one of our boutiques, you know how special our displays are. That is because we construct almost everything ourselves here in Philly. This photo is one of our display designers crafting a felt rug that is part of our window display in our new Boston store location at the Prudential Center.