Life‑Size Luxury: How Harrods Elevated Concession Marketing with Portrait Displays & Seamless Projections
How Harrods modernised concession marketing with immersive digital displays, seamless content delivery and centrally managed campaigns.
The vision
One of the world’s most iconic and famous department stores, Harrods, contacted Vizst Technology to discuss their need for visually stunning display AV solutions.
Their ultimate goal was to improve the already ‘superb’ shopping experience at Harrods. With this in mind, their management team wanted to deliver multi-faceted digital content, rich in high-quality creative content, across a wide variety of state-of-the-art edge-blended projectors and ‘high-definition’ (HD) screens. Harrods also wanted to replace existing analogue systems with reliable, cost-effective digital solutions that could handle a plethora of media types.
With their business model focused on selling media space to ‘store concessions’, it was imperative that any new media infrastructure delivered 100% up time and was easy to update. In particular, new displays would require ‘extreme’ viewing angles and would need to provide sufficient brightness and luminosity to attract even the most discerning customers.
The challenges
As one of the world’s most recognised luxury retailers, Harrods needed digital display technology capable of matching the premium experience customers expected throughout the store.
The challenge was to deliver consistent, high-quality content across a diverse range of display formats, from concession screens to large-format projections, while maintaining exceptional visual quality and reliability. Harrods also needed a solution that would allow marketing teams to update content quickly and efficiently, ensuring campaigns remained relevant across multiple locations and brand concessions.
With the store generating revenue through concession marketing opportunities, uptime was critical. Any new solution needed to provide a dependable platform capable of supporting a wide variety of media formats while maintaining the performance expected within a luxury retail environment.
The solution
Vizst Technology installed a network of retail digital signage systems to drive the screens in the main thoroughfare areas, followed by individual screens on concession counters ranging from 40″ to 82″. One particular digital display, a single 85” floor-standing display in ‘portrait’ orientation, was installed in the Men’s Department. Providing a realistic ‘life-size’ display, one of the first ever, this display was cutting-edge.
A further application involved two large projectors that were displaying ‘still images’ in a slideshow. Vizst Technology supplied a display system capable of driving both projectors allowing the playback of ultra high definition video! This required Vizst Technology’s special software to control the output of each projector to allow a large, single, seamless video. The network requirement to drive these high-definition screens was huge. As a result, Vizst Technology replaced a substantial volume of existing low resolution analogue cables with with modern high definition video over ethernet cabling.
One of the biggest challenges was to display different media types across radically different screen sizes. This required complex and highly intelligent software and considerable expertise from Vizst Technology. As one of the world’s most luxurious retail sites, Harrods required the installation to be managed out-of-hours. The Vizst Technology installation team was able to provide a full-service installation of all hardware, cabling, software, and commissioning.
The results
Enhanced luxury experiences
Elevated the in-store shopping experience
100+
Modernised concession marketing
Delivered dynamic content for concession brands
Centralised content control
Simplified content scheduling and updates
Reliable digital infrastructure
Provided a stable, scalable display platform
To support the extensive variation of screen and media types, Vizst Technology developed a bespoke hardware and software solution based on eSign software platform. This bespoke solution for Harrods allowed a wide variety of image and media types to be controlled and scheduled across the large range of displays.
Following installation, Vizst Technology trained the Harrods marketing team in scheduling and managing the multi-media content. The results of the Vizst Technology visual display solutions have proved to have an extremely positive effect on consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviour within the store. With Harrods shoppers already used to ‘the best’, the Vizst Technology retail digital display solutions met and exceeded the initial brief in providing the ultimate ‘wow’ factor.
The benefits
Immersive experiences
Caputure attention with impactful digital content.
Seamless content delivery
Display content consistently across screens.
Simplified management
Control content from a central platform.
Marketing agility
Launch and update campaigns quickly.
Built for reliability
Maintain performance across the estate.
Future-ready platform
Support evolving retail requirements.
“What a challenge to rise to! One of the world’s most famous stores and a management brief to ‘wow’ shoppers! We worked hard to deliver a state-of-the-art video display solution that allowed wide viewing angles, vivid colour with amazing brightness… and the ability for their marketing teams to refresh content daily across a number of screens in different locations. A big challenge… and a great client to work for.”
Robin