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Chippenham company City Dressing has been nominated for an award recognising promotional innovation for a window display project in France, which turned empty shopfronts into attractive 'virtual shops'. The company has also reported new business following the nomination for eight creatives installed by City Dressing in Domfront, Normandy.

As a result, City Dressing was chosen to 'transform a huge empty eyesore' at a road junction in the town of Fumel, which involved creating a 500sq m 'virtual library' on three sides of a shop. The project, which took a four-strong team ten hours to install, is part of a larger scheme covering 20 empty shops in the town.

"Our approach wins kudos for its artistic appeal but there's also an important commercial aspect to it," states Jeremy Rucker, director, City Dressing. "One of our strongest selling points is that 20 percent of the units we improve get leased within six months of the image going up.

"With so many shops closing during the current recession, this is a tremendous achievement, and the challenge in Fumel was to create an aesthetically pleasing and dramatic image while drawing attention not to the fact that the shop stood empty, but to its potential."