Retail Customer Experience Panel Discussion

Understanding customer desires is always a high priority for business. This led art and framing industry magazine Decor Magazine to conduct original research using small focus groups. At the recent Decor Expo trade show, the magazine invited a panel of experts to comment on these findings. Those invited to participate were:

• Litsa Spanos, the president and founder of Art Design Consultants, Inc., in Cincinnati, winner of the Marketing Excellence Award in DECOR's 2007 Top 100 Art & Framing Retailers' awards and 15-year veteran of the art-and-framing industry.


• Mary Inden, the owner of The Gilded Edge Frames and Gallery in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. She is a 20-year veteran of the art-and-framing industry and winner of several DECOR Top 100 Art & Framing Retailers' awards.


• Roy Saper, 29-year owner of Saper Galleries and Custom Framing in East Lansing, Michigan and recipient of the award for Best Store Event in DECOR's 2007 Top 100 Art & Framing Retailers' awards for a two-month-long Picasso exhibit that drew thousands of visitors.


• Bob Warshawer, owner of Warshawer Custom Picture Frames in Lexington, Massachusetts, 40-year framer and CPF since 1992.


• Jini Lynn Lumsden, MCPF, master framer at The Art Shop in Greensboro, North Carolina, a shop that's received the Top 100 award many years in a row.


• Prestige Framing Academy's Stuart M. Altschuler

An extremely lively discussion ensued. That discussion is available for download by right clicking this link. Then, choose Save File As, and save it to your computer. It may be played on any mp3 player. To use it on an iPod, just bring it into to iTunes and then send it to your iPod. Or, you may play the entire discussion right here by pressing the play button below the photo above. The discussion runs one hour and fifteen minutes.