When a French fashion company opened a store in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, it wanted a specific architecture style. However, a major concern was that the store’s existing skylights would wash out any video screens. Sharp professional displays proved to be the right monitors for the job.

Business Environment Challenges

A world-famous French fashion designer opened a store in New York City’s trendy downtown SoHo neighborhood. The company called on a famous architect in luxury fashion to design the 20′ wide x 50′ deep store, which is a small boutique-style space in comparison to Manhattan’s enormous uptown retailers.

The architectural company constructed the store with tall ceilings and skylights. The next phase was to add a video wall along the back wall of the store to show off the company’s latest fashions. The concern was that the store’s existing skylights would drown out the colors of the videos shown on the monitors.

Business Technology Solutions

Media Services Worldwide, a company that designs, specifies and installs multimedia environments, was consulted to provide a video wall that would not only be bright enough, but also make the room appear larger. Sharp 60″ Class (60″ diagonal) PN-V601A professional video wall displays, boasting a 700-nit brightness, offered the store the brilliance it needed to outshine the skylights.

A 4×4 configuration of 16 displays was used to create a 240″ (diagonal) video wall, filling up the 20′ back wall of the store. Numerous mirrors were placed around the video wall to make it, as well as the store, appear larger. In addition, 2.5-millimeter Sharp mirrored frames were also installed on the monitors, instead of traditional frames, to complement the mirrors surrounding the video wall.

“Each of the four display arrays is equipped with its own media player,” explains Media Services Worldwide Director of Technology Garry Darvin. “Synchronized video content plays over all of the screens with elements passing from one screen to another. A runway model appears to walk continuously across the four screens.” He adds that the Sharp display was chosen by the fashion company’s representatives over two other vendors’ models that were brought in.

Innovative Results

The Sharp video wall became the focal point of the store and contains content specifically for the SoHo location. For example, images of Parisian gardens mixed in with video content of models walking in the latest clothing is used to show off the fashion company’s spring collection. The 4K content is updated on a regular basis via Internet feed directly from a video content provider in Paris.

According to Darvin, the fashion company’s representatives were highly impressed with the results. “Their representatives were initially concerned about the skylights washing out the imagery, but they have mentioned to me that the video wall looks absolutely amazing and even better than they envisioned,” he says. “They use a lot
of vibrant colors when creating the content and the Sharp displays really punch the images out.”