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How the right lighting can be as good as a refit

Lighting

Whether you’re running a jewellery shop or a fashion boutique, you don’t need to rip the guts out of the place to improve how it looks. In fact, the addition of some quality lighting here and there could be all that is required for a complete retail transformation.

Forget about costly refits and disruptive decorative works. When the right lighting is used effectively, you can trick your customers into thinking you’ve just spent a fortune on a major shop refurbishment.

Ways the Right Retail Lighting Can Make a Difference

Create a Warm Welcome

You don’t need to redecorate or remodel in order to improve the welcome you give to your customers. With the right lighting solutions in the right places, you can create a warm welcome before people even enter your store. This starts with quality window lighting, as well as a well-lit entrance area.

Putting in floor lamps next to certain products can catch people’s eye, and draw them toward certain sections in your store. Imagine a dark corner versus a properly illuminated one and you can imagine how differently people will react when they see both an unlit corner and one that’s tastefully done with the customer in mind. 

Create the Right Atmosphere for Browsing

The atmosphere you create in your store is crucial to the overall shopping experience. For example, if you’re selling premium clothing, you might want to encourage shoppers to hang around for a while. You can do this with the use of subtle and soothing lighting, rather than by making wholesale changes to your store’s layout and decor.

Enhance Your Existing Decor

Certain products require a luxurious, well-appointed store environment. But you don’t necessarily need to decorate to create the illusion of a premium shopping experience. A combination of pendant, spot and mood lighting can create the ambience you’re looking for. If your store is lit in all the right places, you may not need to decorate at all.

Create a Functional Shopping Space

By identifying the customer journey in your store, you’ll be able to spot problem areas that have the potential to adversely affect your sales. For example, A dark area of your store may be making shopping difficult for your customers. Bathe the area in light, and watch your sales skyrocket. Larger stores can also benefit from well-lit thoroughfares, and more subtly lit product displays.

Highlight Key Products

By bathing certain items in light, you can make them the star of the show. Perhaps you have a line that hasn’t been performing well. Or maybe you want to point your customers in the direction of high-margin purchases. Whatever your reasons, you can use lighting to give certain products priority in your store.

How Lighting Increases Sales

Take a look at a large online retailer, and you’ll notice that all of their products are lit beautifully. Lighting products for e-commerce websites is a surprisingly time-consuming and laborious process, but retailers invest in quality photography because it showcases products and inspires impulse purchases.

And the same principles apply to brick-and-mortar retail stores. Make finding products as easy as possible for your customers. And once they’ve found what they’re looking for, make sure there’s enough light in the right places for customers to inspect your products. The easier and more enjoyable you make the shopping experience, the more people will buy.

Create a Bespoke Lighting Solution for Your Store

The one-size-fits-all approach rarely works when it comes to store lighting. Visual merchandising specialists can assess your premises, and identify exactly where different lighting solutions can transform the shopping experience. In all likelihood, this will mean installing several different types of light, including pendants, track lighting, surface-mounted lighting and LED spotlights.

The best lit stores are often divided into zones. There are browsing areas, purchasing areas, buying areas and multi-purpose areas, and all of them have their own unique lighting requirements. Accent, ambient and high-activity lighting are all usually required. But when they’re used effectively, they can — in an instant — transform a relatively run-down shop into something very special.

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