VICTORIA'S SECRET
HOLIDAY DECOR
Art Direction: Ricky Gonzalez & Nelson McCreary
SketchUp: Danny Painter & Nelson McCreary
As an illustrator for VS, my role focused on creating seasonal visual merchandising concepts. For each floor set, our team collaborated with Marketing, Production, and Merchandising teams to provide beautiful props, new store fixtures, decor, marketing pieces, and thoughtful merchandising strategies. Artwork ranged from conceptual sketches to finished, pixel-perfect renderings.
The theme for Holiday decor each year is determined by self-conducted trend research, ispiration-gathering, and information provided by the packaging & pattern design team in New York. After receiving samples of textures, patterns, materials, and color palettes, I was responsible for ideating and illustrating initial decor concepts and how they would apply to fixtures, window displays, and common set-ups in our stores. More complex, elevated designs were reserved only for the top high-profile stores, while simple decor (such as garland) was used for chain stores. After several rounds of drawings and presentations of live mockups, my role expanded to creating mechanicals with perfect die lines and rendering final, production-ready artwork.
The following images are my concept drawings and final art applied in stores worldwide and in the brand's holiday social media campaigns.
Selected 2015 inspiration images with materials and colors.
Window display sketches, spot illustrations, and foliage studies.
Refined concept renderings (Photoshop).
First round of live window mockups.
Townhouse Photoshop rendering for the winning window display concept. Sketch-Up line drawings by Nelson McCreary and Danny Painter were passed on to me for pixel-perfect coloration and additions of garland and snow. Because each VS store has windows with varying dimensions, I had to render several versions of townhouses and make sure they were consistent in coloration, shading, and technique. The process involved lots of fine-tuning and frequent collaboration with my directors.
Townhouse variations for single-wide and double-wide store windows.
Installed window display with marketing images in place, set at Easton Town Center in Columbus, OH. The display includes the townhouse artwork printed flat, with light boxes containing marketing images behind it. We applied a layer of frost on the glass as well as rotating disco lights inside the windows to add an element of motion.
Entry table merchandising illustration.
Entry table decor set in the store.
Garland installed on partitions & 3D fragrance bar shroud featuring illustrated townhouse.
Detail: 3D Fragrance bar shroud.
Illustrated gift cards. Modified versions of 1st, 3rd, and 5th designs (top to bottom) were sent to production.
Custom over-size snow globe installed in the Herald Square Victoria's Secret in NYC. I provided flat artwork pieces and assisted co-worker Julio Jimenez with the mechanical and die lines for the project.
Illustrations featured on the Secret Rewards marketing material and Instagram (credit: VS Marketing Team).
