No Pane, No Gain

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ChadMichael Morrisette’s basement looks like a convention of mannequins.

Jammed upright as if waiting for the next train in a crowded New York subway station, they wear wigs, sport colorful bits of clothing or stand naked unabashed. There are more of them upstairs, stretched out on tables or lounging on the floor. In a home office near the living room, one particularly laid-back dummy relaxes nonchalantly in a chair.

The hundreds of lifelike figures are the raw materials of CM Squared Designs, a West Hollywood startup with an edge. Run by two partners out of their three-bedroom home, the company designs and installs provocative boutique window displays that often cause a stir.

“We do windows to get attention, and that’s the whole point,” said Morrisette, 29. “We do windows that people couldn’t find anywhere else. We are artists doing merchandising work.”

The company was founded by Morrisette in 2005 after a brief career designing windows at the San Diego stores of Nordstrom and, later, Saks Fifth Avenue. CM Squared now has five regular clients, mostly cottage boutiques on L.A.’s Westside, for which it designs and installs new windows every four to six weeks. There are also as many as six additional seasonal customers, bringing CM Squared’s total window output to 40 to 60 per year.

The displays are notable for their edginess, almost always drawing attention and sometimes outright controversy. One, for instance, depicted the Virgin Mary in a miniskirt and another re-created a funeral.

“It’s today’s young mind-set,” is how Ilse Metchek, president of the California Fashion Association, describes the pair’s work. “What they’re going to do when they’re grown-ups is something else again.”

In fact, the company grew out of what some might consider a childlike impulse on Morrisette’s part. After moving to Los Angeles and working for a time as a designer with an event planning company called Good Gracious Events, he grew tired of temporary nature of decorating rooms for events.

So one day, passing a Sunset Boulevard jewelry store with what he considered boring window displays, Morrisette impulsively went in. “I told them I could do a better job,” he recalled, “and they said OK. I did a design; they liked it and they gave me a contract for a year.”

In 2008, he met interior designer Mito Aviles, also now 29, and their collaboration began.

Windows on the edge

Morrisette and Aviles said their windows generally take about two weeks to design and install. They charge about $500 for a small display without materials to $4,500 for a 16-foot window including mannequins and props.

The recent Mother Mary display at Madison 3rd Street, an up-scale women’s clothing boutique, featured three well-dressed wise women bearing shopping bags with gifts.

“We thought they would get the criticism,” Morrisette said. Instead, several disgruntled passers-by contacted the Catholic Church complaining about the short-skirted Mary.

Another display at Madison on Melrose exhibited black-veiled mannequins surrounding a flag-draped coffin commemorating the death of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who had just committed suicide. It was maintained even after McQueen’s design company lodged a protest.

The pair’s most controversial display to date, ironically, wasn’t in a store but at their home: a Halloween exhibit depicting then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin hanged in effigy from the eaves. It was removed after visits by West Hollywood’s mayor, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and representatives of the U.S. Secret Service, all of which garnered headlines.

Despite the controversy – or perhaps because of it – most clients seem pleased.

“The work is amazing,” said Darren Gold, owner of Alpha Gear for Gents on Melrose, a hip Westside men’s clothing boutique where one window re-created the cover of a Helmut Newton book using a female mannequin with pubic hair.

CM Squared changes the boutique’s two bay windows monthly. Since contracting with the design company three years ago, Gold said, foot traffic at his store has increased by about 20 percent.

“I attribute it to the provocative, eye-catching windows,” he said. “They have a theatrical, almost in-your-face perspective that is very animated and dramatic. Our customers know that our windows will be special. It’s become part of our whole branding image.”

Justine Roddick, owner of erotic Westside boutique Coco de Mer, said she has seen traffic increase 10 percent to 15 percent since becoming a client last year.

During the Thanksgiving season, a window featured the figure of Pocahontas lying in a forest with John Smith standing over her next to a peacock. “In this economic climate,” Roddick said, you have “to put some humor and cleverness in your windows.”

Morrisette and Aviles said they’d like to spread that cleverness to at least a few clients in New York by the end of this year. In addition, they want to start a mannequin rental company, hire two more employees and double their revenues within five years.

However, Metchek sees that as a tall order, noting that car-centric Los Angeles has a relatively small market for upscale window displays. The majority of store windows nationwide are put together by designers employed by big corporate chains, or, in smaller stores, the owners themselves, she said.

Second, Metchek believes the fledgling company already has broken a cardinal rule: “They blew it with a lot of business people. If you want any of the big companies, making political or religious statements is something you avoid.”

Lynn Sperling, owner of the Sperling & Hileman Group, a retail consulting firm based in Los Angeles, doesn’t share that opinion. She said the economic downturn has left many malls and shop owners re-evaluating the way they do business.

One result could be a move away from the conservative corporate window displays to which most Americans have become accustomed. Thus, while Aviles and Morrisette are still what Sperling calls “the shock jocks of window display,” they may represent a wave of the future.

“They might be on to something,” she said. “One thing these guys are doing is thinking outside the box. Anybody who does something to stop customers and catch their eyes has potential. This, done the right way, could help individual retailers set themselves apart.”

CM Squared Designs

FOUNDED: 2005

HEADQUARTERS: West Hollywood

CORE BUSINESS: Custom design and

installation of window displays for retail

outlets, especially independent boutiques

EMPLOYEES: 2

GOAL: Expand into New York and hire an

additional assistant and a business manager within the next year

THE NUMBERS: Revenue of $125,000 in 2009. Projecting $150,000 to $175,000 in 2010

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