Cosmeticians share holiday merchandising ideas

Drug Store News, Sept 6, 1993

Some of the best ideas for Christmas merchandising come out of the stores, from cosmeticians, managers and store employees sitting down and brainstorming what they can do to bring a little Christmas spirit into their aisles.

"It's really hard when you have a small store as we do," says Marge Masunas, a cosmetician who works in a Chicago Osco drug store, "but when we get close to the season, we all get together and try to come up with something that customers will enjoy."

There's no bullpen in Masunas' stores, just a regular cosmetic wall, and Masunas says all she has to work with are a "couple of small ends." But one year, she and her co-workers created a gingerbread house. "We basically put some eaves over a 6-foot end, closed it off with some brick paper and we filled it with fragrance gift sets. Customers told us it made the store more fun to shop.

"Another year, we built a train and put gift sets in that." To make the train, Masunas said she and her co-workers put down two-by-fours and covered them with red paper. "I wanted it to be a red caboose," she said.

Some chains planogram their Christmas endcaps, but even when that's the case, they usually give their cosmeticians some flexibility to play with. "Our store is beautiful at Christmas," said Linda Lemus, who was filling in as a cosmetician for an Eckerd drug store in Tampa, Fla. "Headquarters sends us a decoration kit, and, as long as we follow the planogram for what goes on the ends, we can pretty much decorate as we like."

Lemus says the stores have "big, red velvet ribbons everywhere at Christmas. We usually have five different kinds of artificial trees, which we sell, and each year, we decorate one of each kind so we have Christmas trees throughout the store. "And we have chimes from an electric bell. We put garland around the perimeter of the department. We always spritz various fragrances into the air so customers can sample several products."

Artistic license

In Detroit, Beverly Jones, who has been a cosmetician with Perry Drug for over three years, approaches her holiday displays like a painter. "I never know what I'm going to do until do it," she says of her displays. "I'm like a painter with a blank easel and a brush. I take my crepe paper and whatever comes out, comes out."

Jones always puts her No. 1 sellers on display at Christmas. "Gloria Vanderbilt, Primo, Impostors, Sand & Sable, Emmeraude. They always do well. "Last year, !ex'cla-ma'tion was really hot, so I displayed it with black and white crepe paper around it.

I get ideas from the department stores too. I like to make up little baskets of cotton balls, and I spray them with different fragrances and hand them out to people as they come into my department. I tell them to just carry it around and see what happens. Most of the time they come back and buy."

Bath gift baskets did well at Perry last year, so Jones is preparing to give them even more display space this year. "Vitabath has some cute sets with an after-bath splash, little soaps, sponges."

In Santa Clara, Calif., Jeannette Ballard, an assistant cosmetician with Longs Drug, starts putting up her Christmas displays in November.

Ballard normally builds many displays around fragrance gift sets, using decorations like streamers and crepe paper. "A lot of our stores try to create a scene like a chimney or a fireplace with stockings hung on it. "We always do a lot with Old Spice because we get so much of it, and the package being red is perfect for Christmas. One year, one of our cosmeticians made a lighthouse display for Old Spice and that really stood out. She used gold and silver streamers."

This year, Ballard is giving more display space to bath gift sets. "Bath is really selling well for us. I think it's because people really do make up their bathrooms these days. They use a lot of bath items as accessories."

In Alabama, cosmeticians for Harco Drug say they always have a Christmas tree in their cosmetic departments, and they decorate their cosmetic counters with garlands and Christmas balls. To brighten up endcaps, they put out little snowmen and Santa Clauses, and they use red, green and white streamers throughout the store. They also use the Christmas decorations that suppliers send in with their pre-packs.

Some Harco stores set up a table for Christmas fragrance gift sets, and they often organize the sets by price points: sets under $5 in one section; $10 sets in another section, and so on, to make it easier for customers looking for gifts in a certain price range.

In Philadelphia, Drug Emporium cosmetician Ernestine Brockenbrough says it's hard to put up too many ambitious displays "because we do so much business at Christmas they don't last." She says her store always puts up streamers everywhere: in the aisles, on the gondolas, on the cosmetic wall.

In addition, Brockenbrough will dress up the cosmetic counter by putting confetti on the glass and on the shelves, maybe putting a Ziggy doll or a cosmetic bag next to some of the fragrances in the cases. "It's hard even to find space in the case because we always stock up heavily on designer fragrances at Christmas, " says Brockenbrough. "But we try to get into displays because they're so important at holidays. Headquarters sends us photos of what other stores have done to help us come up with ideas."