Collectible Dreams put together an excellent display that included anime, manga, and some great related merchandise.  Note the appeal of shojo merchandise to college women, something that first place winner Planet Comics was also able to exploit.  Here is their description of the store, the display, and the results.

The Store

My name is Stan Tychinski and I am the owner of Collectible Dreams in Selinsgrove, Pa. We are a relatively new store, and have only been open for little more than a year.  Ours is the first full line comics/pop-culture shop this area has seen, so it's been fun introducing 'the locals' to our wide world of anime, comics, toys, and the like. We carry a full line of comic books from all major companies, as well as many independent titles from small press companies such as Oni and Slave Labor. In fact, we have found that a majority of our comics sales fall under these small press titles, as many customers have heard of them but up until now, have not had an outlet to purchase them locally.

The Display

We were very interested in doing the shojo display, because we've found that this is another area that has vast potential for growth in our locale. We decided to showcase Sailor Moon, because it is probably the best known of the anime titles here, and is a good seller for us. Other titles we displayed included Oh, my Goddess!, Cardcaptors, and videos/DVDs of  The Magic User's Club. Although it's hard to see in the photos, we also added a great-selling line of Japanese Shitajiki (writing boards), all mostly with the above named characters. We also showcased a few T-shirts and plush dolls, cards, and RPG books we had that tied in. We put everything on a 4-sided spinner and bookcase/ wall area at the entrance to our comics area.

Results

As far as results, well, we've added at least 5 new manga customers! The great thing was this contest coincided with the return of our local college students, so we set it up just in time for new readers to see that we carried these lines. By far, Sailor Moon has been the most popular, but we've gotten orders for a few other titles such as Love Hina and Saint Tail. We find that these customers  (all college age girls) are more than willing to share their enthusiasm for the genre, so we do expect to add a few more customers down the road, too!  Our set-up has been up for about a week, so we do hope to have more business from it in the next week or so. As an area to grow business, we find that shojo anime and manga is a goldmine yet to be tapped!