8 Great Storage Tips for Your Small Bedroom

We all have this problem at some point. Too much stuff, not enough space. So we have pulled together 8 great ideas to help you make the most of your space!

#1 – Use the Corners

Corners can often become a dead space in small rooms, with random things getting thrown there or a place to keep things out of the way. Use this dead space to your advantage with a spiral hanging space?

#2 – Use the Space Under Your Bed

Reduce the amount of stuff you need to find space for by storing things under your bed. Find the things that you use infrequently and hide them away, leaving plenty of space for the things you use everyday.

#3 – Use a Floating Clothes Rack

Instead of taking up room space with doors and extra pieces of wood, switch to a floating clothes rack. Not only do floating clothes racks leave a small room feeling more open and spacious, but they also enable you to store all of your shoes underneath for easy access!

Get the Avélére Hanging Clothes Rail HERE

#4 – Double Your Hanging Space

Don’t just use a hanger once! Double up on storage space by hanging hangers onto other hangers. Or alternatively try this great little idea:

#5 – Use Your Walls!

Who ever said that your clothes and shoes needed to be stored away out of sight? Instead, use your wall space to store all of your shoes with our handy Avélére shoe rack!

Get the Avélére Shoe Wall Rack HERE

#6 – Draws are Over Rated

Forget about chests of draws, they are bulky, ugly and plain old fashioned! Instead, try using open shelves with boxes to store your clothes.

#7 – Try the Hanger Test

#8 – Use Hooks for Hanging

Put up some simple hooks on your wall and use them to hang belts, scarves and ties. Maximum storage, minimum space.

 There you have it. Time to make the most out of your small room! Have we missed anything? Let us know what you do to maximise the storage space in your small room in the comments section below. And if you enjoyed this post then why not check out our post 9 Reasons Why and Open Plan Wardrobe Will Improve Your Life!

The 5 Keys to Creating an Attractive Boutique Display

Here at Avélére we place a lot of emphasis on creating beautiful displays in people’s homes, but we also know what makes your store tick. The way you present what you sell is often the difference between success and failure, and with a few simple rules you can make sure to tick all of the customers boxes.

 

#1 – Be Bold with Colours, Shapes and Lighting

Customers eyes aren’t attracted to monochromatic displays, so make sure to use some bright and bold colours to make your display stand out. Contrasting red against black or white can work wonders, as does grouping 2-3 colours together. Combine the colours with bold shapes too and create something customers can see from a distance. Once you have your colours and shapes in order then get the lights out, the brighter the better. Focus on the angles you use to avoid shadows, which can make the display look poorly planned. A good tip is to use lights to highlight focal points rather than hang them from directly above, as this emphasises the points you are after and helps to avoid those pesky shadows.

 

#2 – Update Your Displays often and Keep it Seasonal

Don’t let your customers get bored with your displays, try to surprise them by changing things around at least every month. New stock often sells the quickest, so look to put it in a prominent place, and once you get more new stock in then switch the positions around. Giving your store a seasonal theme can also help to show your customers that you care about more than just sales. Hearts for Valentine’s Day, eggs for Easter and brooms for Halloween don’t cost the earth but might just give your customers the welcome feeling they need to make a purchase.

A Harrods Seasonal Window Display

 

#3 – Tell a Story

Try to match your boutiques display with something relevant to your brand or store, and find a way to tell a story. Whether you try to re-create Cinderella with a ball theme and a glass slipper or want to try something simpler like a walk in the park, a story gets your customers more engaged with your products and makes them more hands on. The Harvard Business Review reports that customers spent on average 43% more after handling a product, so get people involved with your story and get tactile!

 

#4 – Put Price Tags on EVERYTHING

No-one likes to ask how much something costs, so don’t make them! Make sure that you have price tags on every single item in your store and try to make them easy to find. A great idea for smaller stores is to even price the display pieces themselves. You will be surprised how often people are interested in buying store furniture for their homes, after all, who said boutiques are the only places where people can show off their clothes?

 

#5 – Keep it Simple

Don’t clutter your windows and don’t clutter your displays. Everyone is familiar with the saying “quality over quantity”, and this applies to your boutique. Customers associate a product that demands its own space with quality, whilst a bunch of products thrown together in a small space screams of something that you aren’t proud of. Think of a Louis Vuitton or Chanel store, each and every one of their items is displayed separately to suggest they have the quality to stand-alone. These tactics aren’t just for the big brands though, try them in your boutique and see the difference it makes!

Louis Vuitton Keeping it Simple

So there you have it, the 5 Keys to Creating Attractive Boutique displays. If you enjoyed this article then check out our 9 Reasons Why and Open Plan Wardrobe will Improve your Life!

9 Reasons Why an Open Plan Wardrobe Will Improve your Life

When you think of a bedroom there are a set of essential pieces of furniture that you put in. A bed, draws, a wardrobe, a lamp, maybe a table, everyone has the same, be does this have to be the case? Instead of having the same pieces of furniture as everyone else to store your clothes why not try something different and use an open plan wardrobe?

Here are 9 great reasons why this would benefit your life!

1. Fashion is art, so display it like it is!

According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the average US household spends over 3% of its annual income on clothing, and this goes up to over 6% if we look at females only. Clothing then clearly represents an important part of most people’s lives, yet the majority of the time out clothes are hidden way behind wooden doors in wardrobes. An open wardrobe lets you see your clothes any time you are in the room meaning that all that money you spent doesn’t go to waste! Also, many pieces of fashion are artistic works in their own rights, so why not use them to decorate your room?

2. Helps you to de-clutter

Wardrobes can become a clothes graveyard, with things staying hidden away for years on end without ever seeing the light of day. An open plan wardrobe in contrast has no doors or secret corners for you to hide away those items you aren’t sure about, which means you have to act. Make a change to your life and get rid of the clutter, this will leave you plenty of space to bring in new and exciting ideas to your life.

3. Open wardrobes are extremely cost effective

Open Plan wardrobes are generally made from a pole to hang your clothes and some supports, nothing else, and so use far less materials than traditional wardrobes with doors, sides and bases. A great side effect of this is that they are cheaper for manufacturers to make and they pass the savings on to you, leaving you with something extra in the bank to fill your wardrobe with!

 

 

4. It will make you more beautiful

Now you have de-cluttered your wardrobe and saved some extra pennies for buying something new, you can begin to appreciate the clothes you have hanging in your wardrobe. New York dermatologist Amy Wechsler highlights that scientists as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon are finding that our inner mood reflects our outer appearance in her book “The Mind-Beauty Connection”. Carefully selecting your clothes and enjoying them in an open display can not only make you feel better, but look better too!

5. Do something different that no one else has

Ikea sells 1 of its famous “Billy” bookcases every 10 seconds across the globe, which if you do the maths works out to 3.15 million per year. Quite a high chance that you will run into someone with the same thing don’t you think? The same goes for wardrobes! So why not go for an open plan wardrobe, something that is far more unique. On-top of this, the beauty of an open plan wardrobe is that even if you do have the same one as someone else, every single one is unique. No one has the same collection of clothes as you, so you will always be in possession of the only one in the world!

6. Use your wardrobe to say something about who you are

Some people like to show who they are through their DVD collections, some people through their book collections, but what about the people who don’t own 101 books or DVDs? Well, everyone owns a range of clothes, so why not let them do the talking instead!

 

 

7. Have a new room every day if you like!

Another great feature of an open wardrobe is that you can change what you see every single day if you like, simply by re-arranging your clothes! Keep your room looking fresh and different as often as you like, something which is pretty hard to do with a traditional wardrobe (unless you happen to have several sets of new doors and are pretty handy with a screwdriver!)

8. Small room? Great!

An open plan wardrobe works great in small rooms! Just think of all the space you could save by getting rid of that bulky, imposing wardrobe and the chest of draws. No more need to close your wardrobe doors to walk past your bed, instead just stroll around your new open display and pick the piece you want to wear today!

9. In a hurry? Not a worry.

Looking to grab a jacket in a rush? Or simply want to check out your choices of shirt next to each other? An open wardrobe makes it really simple to do this, without even touching your clothes!

So what are you waiting for?!

If you enjoyed this article then why not check out our piece on turning your bedroom into a showroom: HERE

 

 

Turning your Bedroom into a Showroom

Gone are the days when we were spoilt for choice. In today’s fast paced world we are bombarded by adverts wherever we turn and yet somehow we all seem to end up owning the same things! How often do you find yourself at a friend’s house when you suddenly spot their table/chair combo is identical to yours or the cupboard in their bedroom looks remarkably familiar? More than you would care to admit I imagine!

 

Avélére Clothing Rack 

 

Clothes however I find are a different story. No one in the world has the same wardrobe. Sure, hundreds of other people might have some of the same pieces as you, but no one can match your wardrobe item for item, and that to me is what makes our clothing styles unique. At Avélére we try to celebrate that uniqueness by turning our wardrobes into show rails and our shoes into pictures.

“93% of people told us their clothes looked best in the shop”

Why do clothes always look better in shops? We asked 100 people on the street where they thought their clothes looked best, and 93% of people told us their clothes looked best in the shop. But why? The clothes themselves don’t change when you get home, nor do shops have a magical formula to make clothes look better. Over 50% of people we asked couldn’t give us a reason why their clothes looked better in shops, but 32% believed it was they way shops displayed the clothes.

“All you need to do is follow one simple rule”

Turning your bedroom into a showroom for your unique clothing style is actually quite a simple process, all you need to do is follow one simple rule: Less is More. Shops don’t put doors in front of the clothes they sell, or hide pieces away to make the shop look more tidy. They have removed all of the clutter you find in a traditional bedroom and use minimalist pieces of furniture to place a focus back on the clothes. This way, the unique style and feel of each brands clothes is able to come across to you, the customer.

 

Avélére Long Shoe Rack and Shoe Pedestal

 

So why not have a think about your bedroom, do you really need wardrobes and big chests of draws to hide away the clothes you spend your hard earned money on? At Avélére we don’t think so, and that is why you will never find a piece of clothing hidden from view in our bedrooms.