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SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, after closing time at Tiffany & Co.'s flagship store on New York's Fifth Avenue, a team of workers descended on the stately retailer to dress it for the holidays. From just past dusk until dawn, they worked for two nights stringing 33,900 white lights along archways and burying hundreds of blinking strobes in custom injection molded pine garland. All told, it took 14 pairs of hands, 10 ladders, and one crane to complete the job.

Across the city and country, similar scenes unfolded. A few blocks south of Tiffany on Fifth Avenue, rival jeweler Cartier is now wrapped in 14,000 linear feet of garland and proclaims "Happy Holidays" in 30 languages across its facade. At the Time Warner Center overlooking Manhattan's Columbus Circle, 1,000-pound LED-lit stars hang from the entranceway. Elsewhere in the city, Macy's Inc.'s flagship store on Herald Square sports enough red ribbon to stretch the length of 70 football fields, and a 16-foot Martha Stewart tree with glass ornaments packed tight as barbed wire.

Unbeknownst to most consumers, is the year-round planning it takes to execute this explosion of retail cheer that lasts a few weeks before disappearing as suddenly as it arrived. In Manhattan, some of the highest-profile work is performed by a small Long Island City, N.Y., firm called Holiday Image Inc. With $10 million in projected sales this year, the company handles decor installation from start to finish for New York City stores including both Tiffany and Cartier (a unit of Switzerland's Cie. Financire Richemont SA), Barneys, Macy's, and Fortunoff as well as office buildings and hotels such as the Essex House. It also works with large retail chains like Gap Inc. and LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA's Sephora to create designs that can be replicated nationally.

"The way I see our business is not just as a Christmas decorating business," says Matthew Schwam, chief executive officer of Holiday Image. "We are a global sourcing business."

This "sourcing" for the Christmas holidays actually begins in October the year before, when Mr. Schwam and other company executives travel abroad to research the latest trends in holiday displays. Holiday Image taps more than 500 factories in nearly two dozen countries, including China and India. Some venues desire only a simple tree and a few wreaths in their lobby; that might run around $10,000 including installation, maintenance and storage from year to year. But other stores have more grandiose visions that can run hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For instance, to get the Happy Holidays message onto Cartier meant building a shed of clear plexiglass, filling it with lighting equipment and projectors, and using a crane to lift the operation onto the roof of a nearby building. Outfitting Tiffany required figuring out how to attach garlands so they wouldn't harm the store's stone exterior. (The solution: building a substructure out of tension brackets and wood 2x4s that grabbed hold of the stone moldings without drilling.)

Holiday Image also decorates Tiffany's interior — this year with 17,717 frosted pine cones, 11,291 red berries and 20,000 feathers, among other things. "It's like a fashion show," says Robert Rufino, Tiffany's vice president of creative services. "You watch a model walk down the runway in the most simple, elegant dress and you wonder why it takes so long to achieve that. But it's a huge, huge job."

While many customers reuse the same decorations from year to year, and hire Holiday Image to install them, some national chains want displays tailored to that year's marketing campaign. Gap this year sought garlands made of striped scarves and ornaments fashioned of yarn to adorn all of its stores nationwide.

It was Holiday Image's job to tap its textile connections abroad, create the designs, and pack 7,029 striped scarf garlands and 155,346 yarn ornaments into boxes, along with simple assembly directions. Gap employees then installed the designs in stores.

"We must build it in an out-of-box way so that almost anyone can take it out of the box and build it and it looks great," Mr. Schwam says.

Similarly, when Sephora's design team described the "enchanted" theme they wanted back in April, Mr. Schwam's crew was charged with finding and shipping nearly 33,000 feet of custom white branches and more than 43,000 feet of crystal to adorn the stores — along with the proper brackets to make them fit. "Their job was to capture aesthetically what we were after, and they were able to do it," says Jennifer Bartlett, director of visual operations for Sephora.

Planning for a store's concept begins seriously in the spring, with most visions being nailed down by June. That's when Mr. Schwam triples his year-round staff of 30 to begin building the decorations in his 40,000-square-foot warehouse in Queens. He hires a cadre of artists, actors and freelancers, paying them an average $15 an hour, which includes overtime, to work through the holidays assembling and disassembling the displays.

Nearly 90% of installations happen at night when shoppers aren't afoot. "If someone's hanging a wreath overhead, I don't want people walking under that," Mr. Schwam says. A lot of work is trial and error. For instance at Macy's, Holiday Image's crew had to figure out how to plug in a lighted wreath without a messy cord showing. The trick: opening up the face of the clock where the electrical outlet is hidden. Says Mr. Schwam: "You could stare for hours and hours and not know it was there."

The supervisors of Mr. Schwam's installation crews all carry BlackBerrys to email him pictures and notes of installations. Back at headquarters, administrative staffers record each day's findings into a computer to make next year's job easier.

Each of Holiday Image's 12 trucks are fitted with a substantial tool kit. But inevitably, a necessary work item, say gaffer's tape, is missing. To prevent a work slowdown in the middle of the night, Mr. Schwam has constructed his own makeshift 2,000-square-foot hardware store at company headquarters complete with nuts and bolts, electrical wire, male and female plugs. "There is an absolute sense of urgency while decorating," Mr. Schwam says. "From the customer's standpoint, they are back in business the next day whether we are done or not, and if it's halfway, it's not going to look right."

If certain jobs are too large to complete overnight, Holiday Image crews take pains to hide their tracks. The installation of the 12 LED stars at the Time Warner Center required five nights, so Mr. Schwam's team put up three stars symmetrically one night and the rest later.

As soon as the holidays are over, Holiday Image's team must swoop in to remove the work as fast as they installed it. In cases where retailers will use the same designs the next year, items are packed into heavy rodent-proof cardboard boxes, labeled with customers' names, addresses and items. Boxes are then stored on 20-foot racks at Holiday Image's air-conditioned and heated headquarters. A computerized floor plan of the room details every box's location.

But the decorations don't stay dormant long. Beginning Jan. 15, boxes are pulled back out and the contents refurbished. Burned-out bulbs get replaced; crushed ornaments and faded greenery tossed out or donated to charity.

To ensure a company's display doesn't start looking skimpy, Mr. Schwam typically buys 15% to 20% extra of everything. Come March, the cycle begins again with another trip abroad to recap the previous season and preparation for a trade show called GlobalShop where the firm presents its newest concepts and designs to retailers.

As for right now, while the rest of the world's holiday bustling peaks, the company has a rare moment of down time. "We'll have parties and celebrate," Mr. Schwam says.

"Because pretty soon, we've got to start planning for take down."

Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com