For 25 years Ignaz Gorischek was charged with designing and executing visual displays for Neiman Marcus. Whether a 14-foot-tall Christmas tree made from vintage automobile parts and tail lights, or plastic crawl-through tunnels in store windows, Gorischek defied imagination with displays that made Neiman Marcus shoppers stop, look, engage and sometimes gasp.
“I call [visual displays] speed bumps, because they can cause you to slow down and make you take notice of the retail environment,” said Gorischek. “I’m big on dwell time in stores. You’re in the store for a reason. Why not give shoppers more of a reason to engage with the store?”
Gorischek’s work has drawn accolades from a range of sources, such as Design:Retail magazine, which awarded him the Markopoulos Award in 1997, or the mother of a young cancer patient at a Texas hospital, who said Gorischek’s transforming her son’s crayoned drawings into holiday window art changed the boy’s life. “Sometimes creative endeavors are about way more than selling someone something,” Gorischek said.
This year, after 25 years with Neiman Marcus, Gorischek joined international design consulting firm CallisonRTKL as vice president of its retail design group. “I wanted to be involved with a multitude of different types of projects and experiences,” he said. “I also wanted the opportunity to work internationally, something I haven’t been able to do in previous positions.”
CallisonRTKL, in turn, is eager to harness Gorischek’s connections, creativity and vision. “Ignaz thinks of retail design in just a completely different way,” said Eric Lagerberg, a CallisonRTKL executive vice president and the firm’s global practice group leader for retail stores. “He’s always looking for inspiration. He finds it in everything from car shows to traffic jams.”
Gorischek never intended to enter the visual design field. He knew nothing about the industry when he started at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, as an advertising major in the early 1970s. “My career started because of a little gag, if you want to know the truth,” he said. To earn some extra money, Gorischek worked in the sporting-goods department at the Rike-Kumler Co., a department store in Dayton popularly know as Rike’s. One painfully slow evening Gorischek grew restless and decided to have a bit of fun with some of the displays. He created a mannequin from tissue paper and dressed it in a winter hat, ski goggles and ski gloves; then he positioned it on the second-floor balcony in such a way that it seemed to be peering down on the shoppers below. The next day, the store’s display manager and corporate director asked Gorischek if he knew anything about the new feature. “I cautiously asked them why,” Gorischek said. “If they didn’t like it, I was going to pin it on my friend,” he quipped. But it was quite the opposite: The executives were taken with Gorischek’s creativity — and they paid him to keep doing it. “They opened the doors to the art of display for me,” Gorischek said.
After Rike’s, Gorischek spent 15 years at department store chain Burdines, in Sarasota, Fla., moving up from visual stylist to visual manager to regional director. He landed at Neiman Marcus in 1992, where he worked his way up to vice president of store development. Part of Gorischek’s responsibility at Neiman Marcus was to create eye-catching displays that highlighted the merchandise in creative ways. “Stanley Marcus [store president from 1950 to 1972] used to always say that retail is a lot like a newspaper,” said Ginger Reeder, vice president of corporate public relations for Neiman Marcus. “The news is all the same. It’s how you present it that makes it distinctive.”
One of Gorischek’s most popular decisions was bringing back the Neiman Marcus “fortnight” display, an annual tradition: For two weeks the company’s flagship Dallas store was transformed into a facsimile of some exotic place. The first year Gorischek chose to honor a destination dear to the company’s heart: the state of Texas, erecting 6-foot-tall oil derrick replicas throughout the store that at the opening gala spewed thousands of pounds of black feathers out onto the guests.
For the 1999 fortnight exhibition, Gorischek turned the main floor of the Dallas store into an Italian village at dusk — even importing mask artists, fashion designers and puppeteers from Italy. Authenticity in visual merchandising has always been important to Gorischek. “People rely on you for inspiration and education,” he said. “For instance, I consider styling a mannequin properly an important form of education. If it’s not styled properly, you could send someone out dressed incorrectly.”
The hardest part of the job is never anything tactical, he notes. Instead, it is “convincing those that need to approve a concept that it’s a great idea, a big idea,” he said. “If you can’t sell an idea in its entirety, that’s when things can start to get a little diluted.”
Gorischek has encountered little resistance to his ideas over the years, but he has often managed to work around even the little there has been. “I’ve found ways to come back and sneak it in,” he said. After all, he says, figuring out how to stay true to the vision in one’s head is an art of a whole different sort.