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Retail Lighting Tips:
The Right Light - It's Part Theater,
Part Therapy, and All Promotion

By Chuck Beardsley

Careful consideration must be given to visual cues, which will aid in establishing the image a store wishes to project. The lighting system should be designed to create a pleasant and secure environment for conducting business. Sophisticated consumers and the deployment of fewer trained sales personnel make it essential to present merchandise under lighting that will help increase sales. Thus, attention should be given to the quality, quantity, and effectiveness of lighting in rendering the color and detail of displayed merchandise or the task area.—Directly quoted from Recommended Practice for Lighting Merchandise Areas (A Store Lighting Guide) IESNA RP-2-01.

Retail lighting is part commerce, part theater. It thrives on change—new juvenile products, new maternity styles. But subtlety can be just as important as drama. A customer should be aware of the merchandise, not the lighting.

Crucial to any merchandising effort is the ability to attract attention to display areas and to attractively feature the displayed products. A ceiling crowded with recessed fixtures or light tracks creates visual chaos.

Color is a powerful merchandising tool. The choice of light and colors for displays and signage attracts attention and guides customers. Light enhances colors, textures, and forms, while creating a vibrant and visually pleasing shopping atmosphere.

How does light behave? And in what way does merchandise reflect and absorb light? Merchandise with low reflective qualities—like black fabrics—requires more light because the majority of the light falling on the surface is absorbed. Brown and black leather goods are examples of products having low reflectance, requiring higher light levels to compensate for light absorption.

Because clothing and accessories are frequently displayed on racks, shelving, and walls, the often-dark colors of the merchandise absorb lots of light.

A strong contrast between the product and its background increases visual clarity.

Picture this: a children's clothing store with densely packed merchandise. Traditional fluorescent troffers offer a lot of light but do not enhance the appearance of the clothing displays. In fact, because they are the brightest objects in view, they distract customers. Under the cool-white fluorescent lamps, bright red or yellow clothing looks dull. Incandescent reflector lamps lack the focus of more efficient sources like halogen and metal halide PAR lamps.

OK, so what's a troffer? A halogen or metal-halide PAR lamp? And what's the difference between a lamp and a light bulb?

A troffer is a long recessed lighting unit usually installed with the opening flush with the ceiling. Light bulb is the layman's name for lamp or light source. Due to its crisp, white light, halogen technology has been the lamp of choice for retail lighting applications. But low-wattage metal-halide lamps offer higher light output. For example, one 35-watt metal-halide lamp puts out the light of a single 100-watt halogen lamp, which is a gas-filled tungsten filament incandescent source. PAR is shorthand for parabolic reflector lamps.

Recent developments in metal halide technology include better color stability over the life of the lamp, warmer color, higher color rendering, and the introduction of electronic ballasts that better regulate lamp operation. For retail lighting applications, major advantages of the replacement technology include reduced heat generated and longer lamp life, making the lighting system more effective to maintain.

Lamp life is especially important—lights can be on as many as 24 hours a day. Failed lamps are unsightly and can literally dim sales prospects. Replacing them is expensive and disruptive to customers and staff. There is no point in using an exotic lamp unless it serves a critical purpose.

Lighting at the point of sale is necessary to complete a transaction and should enable the customer to evaluate the merchandise and to make a final purchase decision. Good lighting minimizes returns.

So what are the other key ingredients for successful retail lighting?

• Addressing energy codes, which im- pose watts-per-square-foot lighting limits

• Dealing with rising energy costs and fewer maintenance personnel

• Visual comfort—controlling direct or reflected glare

• Putting the light source within a rea- sonable distance of the merchandise, but far enough to prevent fading or burning

• Using light colors on the interior sur- faces of shelving

• Using organized patterns of luminaires—chaotic patterns confuse

• Using the fewest types of lamps to re- duce relamping and maintenance mistakes

• Leaving no merchandise in the dark

• Providing the brightest light for major displays

The website of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America offers further details on quality lighting practices: www.iesna.org IESNA RP-2-01, Recommended Practice for Lighting Merchandise Areas, may be ordered online at this site.

Chuck Beardsley is editor of LD+A, Lighting Design + Application, the membership monthly of the IESNA.

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