Good lighting rings the tills

The commercial benefits of good lighting in a retail environment cannot be underestimated – although they are often difficult to quantify. Andy Pearson reports

“The main challenge was to create a dramatic atmosphere while ensuring the product was effectively lit, the customer could shop comfortably and the scheme was energy efficient,” says Tim Larcombe, general manager of jeans brand Levi’s in the UK and Ireland. He is talking about the lighting scheme for the relaunch of the company’s flagship store in London’s Regent Street.

Larcombe’s words serve to illustrate just how tough it is to light a retail environment. For the Levi’s store, the challenge was to balance a dramatically lit interior with the more practical aspects of guiding customers through the store and displaying the merchandise effectively.

Increased sales

The scheme was designed by Jonathan Morrish, head of retail lighting at Erco Lighting, who worked with retail designers Checkland Kindleysides on the project.

Larcombe says “the store has been enjoying strong financial success” since the refit and reopening, although how much of that growth can be attributed to the lighting is a moot point.

Dominic Meyrick, lighting principal at Hoare Lea, says it is notoriously difficult to equate increased spend on lighting with increased sales. He says clients often want to know how much more they will sell if they invest in more expensive lighting. It is an impossible question to answer: “You cannot guarantee any increase in sales,” he says. However, there is a tenuous relationship between the cost of merchandise and the cost of its lighting, he adds. “The cost of an item for retail ought to be reflected in the cost of the lighting.”

“LIGHTING SELLS; IF A PRODUCTS IS NOT WELL LIT, IT WONT SELL” BILL WRIGHT, FORMERLY JOHN LEWIS

Bill Wright, former Energy and Environment manager at John Lewis and now working as an energy consultant is in no doubt as to the effectiveness of retail lighting: “Lighting sells; if a product is not lit it won’t sell,” he says.

Russell Lipscombe of lighting design consultancy Light Tecnica is certain that retail lighting plays an important role in generating footfall and encouraging people to spend longer in a shop. “If you get the lighting right in a store, people will want to enter and they will feel comfortable shopping there.” He says the way to draw people in is to create long vistas so customers can see to the back of the building. “You need to use vertical illumination on walls, then highlight merchandising areas to provide a focus for the eye, which will help guide people through the store,” he explains.

Different feel

When refurbishing the Fenwick department store in Bond Street, London, Light Tecnica created a different feel for each floor, dependant on the merchandise. On the ground floor is lingerie and cosmetics, so the lighting had to feel very luxurious; first floor is ladies shoes and clothing, which has a more formal feel; second floor is designer clothing so the lighting had to have a designer-store look; the third floor is young fashion, and the scheme features exposed services, lighting track and pendant fittings, again creating a different mood.

Wright agrees that in larger department stores, the lighting solution has to be developed for each specific department: “Retailers need contrast and products lit on an individual basis – the days of one solution fits all have gone”.

What that means in practice is that specific solutions have to be developed for specific applications. “If you’re lighting the furniture department it needs to feel homely so that customers can imagine the furniture in their own homes,”

Wright explains. From a retailers perspective this makes any revamp of the store more difficult. “If a department moves, then its lighting has to move with it,” he says.

Retail alert

As well as differentiating between types of merchandise and brands, lighting is also important to alert customers to further retail areas. Simon Thorp, senior lighting designer at lighting consultancy LAPD, says the firm recently completed a project in Regent Street, London, for a retailer struggling to get customers to visit its store’s basement. For the refit, a feature wall was created with recessed display boxes. LED lighting was embedded in the boxes, beneath the stair handrail and into the stair skirting to create visual interest, rather than “blast the wall with light”. As a result of the refit, the number of shoppers visiting the basement has doubled.

It is all well and good focusing on lighting the shop floor, but most purchasing decisions for clothing are made in the changing room. Controlling colour and shadow is crucial.

As part of Light Tecnica’s design for the refurbishment of Fenwick, a raft-type ceiling was constructed with concealed lighting around the perimeter to gently wash the changing room walls. This was supplemented with vertical fluorescent lighting, with good colour rendering, around the mirror. A couple of low voltage tungsten fittings were set into the ceiling to throw a warm light between the mirror and the person admiring themselves in it. “They cast a nice light onto the person standing there,” explains Lipscombe.

Tailored needs

While high-contrast illumination might be appropriate for luring customers into a designer fashion store, the opposite is true for supermarkets and pile-‘em-high, sell ‘em-cheap fashion outlets. The task here is to achieve a uniform, high level of lighting so people can quickly find and buy the products they are looking for. Hoare Lea’s Meyrick says an inexpensive-looking lighting design is often a deliberate strategy. “If you use a sophisticated baton fluorescent it could send a message that perhaps your products are not as cheap as they could be because you’ve invested in lighting.”

Although supermarkets often have a standard lighting solution, other stores sometimes have a preferred lighting supplier. As a result, the lighting consultant will have to tailor the scheme to work with a defined set of products or a defined cost. Other retailers take the opposite approach: they look to the lighting consultant to produce a performance specification and design so they can tender the project and get the best price, using whichever manufacturer offers them the best value.

A further constraint on the lighting design can occur when a retail scheme is part of a larger shopping centre. In such cases, the developer sometimes stipulates a maximum electrical load for the retail unit and the maximum lighting level for window displays.

Energy efficiency

However, regardless of maximum electrical load, in the current economic climate with energy costs continuing to rise, energy efficiency is becoming a major consideration in lighting design. “Traditionally retail and display lighting have not been the most frugal sectors as far as energy use is concerned,” says Erco’s Morrish, “but this is changing due partly to public opinion, the media’s focus on sustainability and new standards and legislation.” Energy efficiency does not have to be achieved at the expense of lighting quality, he adds, provided the design focus is on lighting vertical surfaces, so customers can make sense of a space, then on using targeted illumination to highlight the products they might wish to buy.

Energy consultant and former John Lewis energy manager Bill Wright says that retail lighting is about to go through an energy revolution. According to him, LED technology is currently on the cusp of being able to replace metal halide lamps, which give out a lot of heat. “There are a lot of metal halide lamps currently used in retail; once LEDs can replace these, retailers will save energy on both lighting and on having to cool a store,” he says, which should mean more work for lighting designers. Vive la revolution.

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