A Peek into Retail Store Window Design Trends

Duggal Visual Solutions

Duggal Visual Solutions produces oversized, complex visuals and fixtures for image-conscious clientele, including world-class museums, global retailers, event planners, Fortune 500 corporations, art galleries, nonprofit organizations, photographers, visual artists and designers.

Founded more than 50 years ago, Duggal has always been an early adopter of imaging technologies. In 1992, Duggal was the first PSP in New York to print a building wrap for a major retailer. Today, Duggal operates more than 17 wide-format printers and seven digital presses in 250,000 sq. ft. of production space in the New York area and Portland, Ore.

Duggal crafts captivating window installations for some of the world’s largest flagship stores. In collaboration with retail teams, Duggal designs and manufactures custom fixtures, lightboxes and displays, and uses a combination of window films, photographic backdrops, CAD-cut vinyl, digital signage and interactive multimedia touchscreens.

Meanwhile, the Duggal InnoLab team educates retail, museum, hospitality and experiential designers how to envision and anticipate the latest trends in visual communications. In the 12,000-sq.-ft. InnoLab showroom and creative space, a diverse group of technologists, 3D animators, industrial designers, retouchers, photographers and multimedia experts show designers myriad possibilities for both printed and digital media, including next-generation OLED displays.

“We are always exploring how to stay relevant and connect with the next generation of consumers,” explains Glenn Rabbach, vice president and creative director of Duggal Visual Solutions. Duggal’s creative team gives retailers practical advice on implementing more options than a single digital signage vendor can.

“The U.S. retailer teams know they need to be experiential, but don’t know how to go about it,” says Blaze Gregorio, design consultant. “Our InnoLab is a youthful team and we’re aware of all the technology out there. Experiential is second nature to us.”

After conducting dozens of InnoLab tours and symposiums, Rabbach says retailers are starting to activate displays with dynamic content. But they are still concerned about how to justify the costs, scale the technology for multiple sites, keep the content updated and incorporate digital displays in a way that blends into the store environment.

Since costly video walls and cutting-edge dynamic signage are beyond the budgets of many retailers, Duggal’s InnoLab devised a method that uses animated LED backlighting to add fluidity to static fabric graphics in silicon-edge frame systems.

In a system Duggal calls LUMIPIXELS, individual pixels of LED lights are grouped on tiles and programmed to intensify or fade out to create the illusion of movement behind key elements of the fabric graphic. Unlike digital displays that require a constant stream of fresh content, LUMIPIXEL lightboxes can be periodically refreshed by changing out the fabric graphic and uploading a new animation.