Planar Video Wall Puts the Focus on Luxury for Diamond and Fine Jewelry Store

In the Detroit metropolitan area of Michigan, you'll find one of those classic Midwestern businesses that began and grew with the family. Tapper's Diamonds & Fine Jewelry started as a dream of brothers Howard and Steven Tapper and now has grown to include three locations and three generations of the family. Tappers has been serving the Detroit region since 1977, delivering personalized service and offering an outstanding selection of the highest quality diamonds, fine jewelry and designer timepieces.

The Tappers have created a tradition of providing customers with the experience of luxury from the moment they walk through the door. That very approach was elevated at the Tappers Somerset location in Troy with the installation of a Clarity® Matrix® LCD Video Wall System (LX55HDU) in a 3x3 configuration from Planar.

Designed and installed by Bluewater Technologies, experiential technology provider, specializing in AV technology, as well as live event production, the video wall delivers ultra-high resolution and superb image quality—allowing Tappers to showcase its collection in striking and exquisite detail.

"We worked closely with a retail architect and the client who both wanted to create an impactful, elegant display that would help attract visitors into the store," said Rob Ring, senior account executive with Bluewater Technologies. "The display needed to appear as part of the design of the store and not something that was hastily added after the fact. It needed to become art within the space."

Featuring outstanding tiled visual performance, perfectly aligned displays and the industry's smallest bezels, the Clarity Matrix provides a nearly seamless video wall solution for complementing the upscale environment of the Tappers store. Clarity Matrix also includes the Planar® EasyAxis™ Mounting System, enabling precise alignment and the thinnest profile so the video wall can be closely installed to the wall surface.

"Lighting is critical when selling jewelry and when we looked at LED, the fear was that the light emitted from an LED video wall would adversely affect the jewels as they are presented to customers," said Ring.
"With Clarity Matrix, the thin bezels essentially disappear, allowing the focus to be on the art and branding in the space."

Benefits of a distributed design

The unique off-board architecture design of the Clarity Matrix transfers heat, noise, weight and potential points-of-failure from the video wall to a remote rack-mounted system, providing installation flexibility and eliminating the need for AC power outlets behind the displays.

With the Tappers store integration, the off-board electronics of Clarity Matrix also helped reduce the construction budget, according to Ring. "By not having to route power to the display location, the client was able to save money on construction costs," he said.

"Cost was a significant consideration with this project and Clarity Matrix fit the budget requirements without having to sacrifice functional objectives."

Positive results

Paul Rujan, store director at the Tapper's Somerset Collection, said the overall reaction from customers has been fantastic. "The video wall is an attention-grabber and has brought a lot of traffic into the store," Rujan said.

The Clarity Matrix video wall has also improved the quality of Tapper's in-store advertising, Rujan said. "The clarity and detail of our products when shown on the video wall is incredible," he said. "We can easily control and operate all in-store advertising through the video wall. It offers lots of flexibility."