Originally published: The Courier Mail
Written by: Ellen-Maree Elliott, CourierMail
Date: December 12, 2011

THE Christmas display window at David Jones' flagship store in Sydney might not be where you expect to find homage to hand-crafted, one-off pieces of art.

David Poulton has designed the David Jones Christmas window display for half a dozen years through his company Promotions in Motion, based in Noosa.

"We use puppetry as our main animation form and we use string puppetry, we use French Mechanical Theatre," he said. "Mechanical theatre is quite old-fashioned and quirky but really good fun to do."

Mr Poulton said the company was a niche manufacturer which approached business from an artistic perspective.

"The way we survive and be successful is that we are not mass produced. We do things that are arty and unique. We build one-off stuff."

It takes five artists about six months to create the mechanical puppet theatre displays for David Jones and a couple of weeks to install.

Mr Poulton said Promotions in Motion wanted to expand into overseas markets, which was slightly challenging at present because of the high Australian dollar.

"England, Canada and Singapore is where we've identified some opportunities for our company," he said. "We get some interesting phone calls from people all over the world who might see a David Jones window (on YouTube)."

Originally published as String ensemble takes David's work to the world