Tools of the Trade: What you Need to Know About Today’s Retail Lighting Design

The main tasks in any retail space, including uniform stores, are buying and selling. One of the most important ways to facilitate these tasks is through proper use of lighting. Retail lighting should attract customers into your store, help them evaluate the merchandise, and help your sales people complete each sale quickly and accurately. Research has shown that lighting installations that are carefully designed with these three factors in mind will actually increase retail sales.

Lighting also provides your customers with instant cues about the type of store they are entering. Therefore, lighting may be very different in a "mass merchandise" store, such as K-Mart or Wal-Mart, than it is in a department store, or in a uniform shop.

What types of lighting are used in the retail setting? What are the considerations behind a well-conceived lighting program? What are the trends in retail lighting design? Can lighting be effective and cost-conscious? We‘ll examine and answer these questions below.

Generally speaking, there are four basic types of lighting used in the retail setting. Lighting which uses fixtures to distribute the light widely, directly or indirectly is called ambient lighting. Ambient lighting enables the customer to see and examine the merchandise, and the sales staff to complete the sale and perform their other duties. While the optimum amount of ambient lighting varies with the type and size of the store, for most uniform retailers, this is the most important form of lighting. Remember, ambient light helps the customer clearly examine the merchandize. To create more emphasis on the product, partially conceal ambient light sources with louvers of baffles.

Accent lighting is used to provide a higher level of light to accentuate selected objects. Accent lighting establishes the importance of certain objects through the use of contrast, and highlights the form, structure, texture or color of the merchandise. While an effective light source, a word to the wise: many stores overuse accents lights, placing them everywhere, and in the case of a uniform store, more is not better. Remember, lighting for retail is all about contrast and focus. Limited accent lighting is desirable to set products apart, to create highlights or enhance texture and to attract attention to window displays. On the other hand, too much accent lighting means no contrast and no focus. This can result in a feeling of visual clutter and can be confusing to customers. Light can be a very effective way of drawing a customer's attention to areas of the store you want them to move toward. For example, it is very effective to light important displays and sales counters to a higher level (sometimes as much as 5 times more light) than the general areas of the store. The greatest lighting value is achieved by balancing ambient and accent lighting.

Perimeter Lighting is used to light vertical surfaces. Asymmetrical light fixtures can direct light on tall vertical shelving and displays, typically located at the perimeter of the merchandise area. Valance lighting allows the source to be quite close to the merchandise, providing a shield or “valance” to conceal the light sources from the view of the customer. Although primarily intended to provide light down on the merchandise, they also can be designed to light up on signage or provide indirect ambient lighting for the space.

Finally, shelf and case lighting are small light sources located very close to the objects being displayed, shielded from the customer’s view. This lighting must be carefully selected for the particular application to avoid accidental contact with hot lamps and to prevent damaging the merchandise with too much ultra-violet radiation or heat.

Increasingly, all retailers, including uniform stores, are seeing lighting as an important design tool in differentiating themselves from their competitors. Color, movement, theater, architectural re info rcement and establishment of theme are all tools used to influence the customers’ perceptions and opinions. And because of growing competition, many in the general retail industry are actually increasing their lighting design budgets, or reconfiguring in some way their existing system. Owners want their products to look as good as possible and are realizing that good lighting is an important factor accomplishing this.

Demographics are also forcing retailers to rethink their lighting patterns. The baby boomer generation is growing older, resulting in changing eyesight for some. A 65-year-old is able to see 1/4 of what a 16-year-old can see. As a result, retail stores are adjusting light levels and becoming brighter.

Today's general public is also more visually aware than they were 10 years ago. Retail spaces are looked at with an increasingly discerning eye, and there is an appreciation for the details in the architecture. This increasing expectation from the viewer is satisfied when the lighting supports the architecture without impacting the overall view. Customers do not want to see track fixtures or a grid of downlights if it is not necessary.

According to lighting designers, LEDs will become the long life, low maintenance and energy efficient light source of the future. Light sources such as LEDs, electro luminescent and light-emitting capacitor films and fiber optics will continue to make an impact on the ways light is applied. LED technology has evolved quickly and is now beginning to offer quality, white-light sources, and fiber optics now appear ready to offer the potential of practical and energy-efficient accent lighting systems.

As lighting becomes more specialized, the ability to replace lamps without changing the angle or rotation of the fixture has become more important. In the long run, designers predict that lockable fixtures will be invaluable to the overall appearance of the store.

Unfortunately, lighting is a prodigious user of a retail store's energy budget. The U.S. Department of Energy says lighting accounts for 59 percent of total electricity use in domestic retail and service buildings. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), retail companies spend almost $20 billion on energy each year, and nearly one-third of it goes to waste.

To be sure, uniform stores want to project a polished image to customers. But that image doesn’t and shouldn’t come at the expense of a store’s bottom line. Applied technology is changing the way stores are being illuminated, and many manufacturers and designers have introduced and implemented lighting systems that deliver significant energy savings and reduce operating costs. Moreover, federal agencies and industry organizations are willing to help retailers accomplish a so-called “green” lighting program, a practice that can significantly lower costs. Check with your local agencies, or for more info rmation on lighting design and cost-cutting measures, visit the following websites:

www.designlights.org ; www.lightingdesignlab.com ; www.doe.gov