Retail Excellence Awards, Tavern on the Green, August 12, 2007

In the ever-expanding world of e-tailers, how does a high-end, brick-and-mortar store adapt its niche identity to a vehicle designed to serve the masses? Such was the dilemma for Homescapes, Carmel, a specialty shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, which initially perceived marketing on the Web as “counterproductive” to its storefront business.

We Came (to NY); We Saw (the sites); We Conquered (our category)! Yay, us! The treks to New York on a slow bus from Boston and a delayed flight from Denver seems a lot shorter when you come back Gold-”plate”ed.

The store’s been REALLY lucky this year with awards and accolades, so it’s nice that our website got a little love, too. Gifts and Decorative Accessories Magazine singled Homescapes out in 2001 for our merchandising and in 2004 for our promotional stuff, but this year’s award was different from those other awards. I don’t mean the recognition (they were all equally great), I mean the actual award. This year it was a lavishly-decorated plate whose underside boasted, “Made in Italy.” Posh, posh! And on the front it read, “Gold Award Website Design.” Posher still!

We took some cinema-verite at the event and set it to the theme music of the evening, and Gifts and Dec. was kind enough to send us the video they’d done about the site, so if you have the time, take a look. It will be like you were THERE (except without the cake).

The Official Word…

The Interpreted Word…