There are hundreds of stores just as motivated as yours to get customers through the door in a mall or lifestyle center. And once you’ve compelled a potential customer to walk in, you need an established atmosphere that fosters sales. When done correctly, your store’s lighting design can differentiate you from the competition and increase sales. Continue reading to understand the risk of a poor lighting design, and learn the top six ways you can improve the lighting design at your retail stores.
The Risk of a Poor Lighting Design
If your store is dark, uninviting, or too bright to the point it is not conducive to driving sales, you will have fewer customers entering your store and even fewer who stick around long enough to make a purchase. Lighting design is the key to attracting a passerby’s attention and setting the mood once they’ve decided to enter your store. And with so much competition in today’s malls and lifestyle centers, every sale counts. With a poor lighting design, your store may get outshined by the competition.
The Top 6 Ways to Improve Lighting Design
1 Hire a Lighting Professional:
Lighting professionals are experts in effectively illuminating your store to encourage sales. To best show off your product and increase sales, work with an experienced lighting professional who understands the newest lighting trends and the latest technologies and can guide you in selecting and installing the lighting products that will work best in your space.
2 Consider Daylight & Color Temperature:
The retail industry is moving away from large indoor structures and towards indoor/outdoor, mixed-use spaces. This trend means many shops will now have exterior windows that let natural light into the store. Natural light can be a significant improvement compared to fluorescent sources as long as it is harnessed and balanced correctly. You can light your storefront with a tunable white luminaire, enabling you to align your lights’ color temperature with daytime and nighttime color temperatures.
3 Understand Your Local Electrical & Energy Codes:
If you have multiple locations across the country, it’s easy to assume you can use the same lighting design at each location. Unfortunately, electrical and energy codes differ in each city and state you’re in, and violating these codes can cost you. Not only will you be subject to fines when the inspector arrives, but you may be paying more than necessary in electrical bills depending on the rates in your area. To avoid these charges and headaches, work with a national lighting expert who can keep your store well-lit, efficient, and in compliance.
4 Select an Easy-to-Maintain System:
Modern lighting trends, like trimless fixtures and discrete linear LEDs, require special installation. Before these trends, maintaining your lighting was as simple as unscrewing a bulb and replacing it with a new one. Now, the majority of fixtures have remote drivers and proprietary LED modules. With this in mind, make sure to place your drivers and special equipment in easy-to-reach areas, and don’t purchase any equipment that will be difficult to replace should an accident occur. Even the most expensive lighting design will not perform well if it is not maintained regularly.
5 Use an All-in-One Control System:
In the past, all retailers like you had to do was flip a switch to control their lighting system. But, with more and more green initiatives and sustainability requirements becoming law across the country, remote-control lighting systems are now a must-have. Code requirements like dimmers, occupancy sensors, and timers make it nearly impossible to remain compliant without a centralized remote control technology, which can be expensive. But, with the right system in place, retailers like you can abide by these requirements and save a substantial amount on your monthly energy bills. For example, some remote controls allow you to do daylight harvesting, which dims your lights as sunlight increases during the day and increases your lights’ brightness as sunlight decreases. A lighting expert can help you choose the system that is right for your stores.
6 Choose a Scalable Lighting Design:
Track lighting has been one of the most used technologies in retail stores for many years because of its flexibility and scalability. Track lighting allows you to add lights, remove lights, and reposition lights with ease, which is highly beneficial for retailers because of the fast-paced, rapid-change nature of the industry. However, track lighting is just one of the many technologies which make your lighting design as scalable as possible.
