Good Lighting Means Good Sales

When looking back over the changes in retail lighting design over the last twenty years it is apparent that the Past really is a foreign country and they really do things differently there. One clear differentiation is that hardly any opportunity is missed these days to sell us something. Branding, retail design and research is a great deal more sophisticated and lighting has adapted to meet the needs of designers and retail analysts. A recent brief for a brainstorming session with designers was to "come up with at least ten ways that lighting can be used as a branded element". Twenty years ago we were over the moon if we managed to steer clients away from "we want it to be 500 lux".

Perhaps it is the rise of the design brief that has led to so lighting design being so much more integrated. My main impression of lighting design at the beginning of my career is that decisions seemed far more accidental and opportunistic than they are today.

About fifteen years ago, I was involved in the refurbishment programmes of several supermarkets. It seemed to be a merry-go-round of copycat schemes. Client 'A' would develop a new strategy, rearranging the floor plan and introducing zones of different lighting effects/light colour temperatures to compliment the products and interior design. Meanwhile, Client 'B' would visit their stores and implement 90% of their scheme. Market research proved Client 'A' was perceived as too expensive so the scheme would be changed again, and Client 'B' would also change their scheme.

One smaller chain had discovered that just by changing the colour scheme and re-orientating the lighting battens from portrait to landscape - a lighting faux pas due to the reduction in vertical illuminance on the gondolas - sales increased by 15%. This actual result was used to justify a theoretical approach: it was reasoned that if by changing the environment by 25% and sales increased by 15%, surely if the environment was changed to a greater degree, and more effort directed at creating a sophisticated brand identity, sales would go up even higher. This strategy produced a lovely interior design with far greater emphasis on the vertical, strongly illuminated hotspots, a great colour scheme and a new logo. However, sales in the new stores never reached the levels they required to make the investment worthwhile.

This haphazard approach to design development is far less common today at the top end of retail lighting design; the impact of globalisation has been a primary force in design techniques. Miles Pinniger, of Pinniger and Partners, designers of Disney Stores and Sainsbury's among others, feels international clothes retailers such as Zara, Mango and Bershka have had the greatest influence on the UK scene. Their design envelopes were created in Europe and implemented faithfully on our turf. Floating walls, gimbal style spotlights and attention to highlighting became design elements copied over and over again in less high profile schemes.

Technology has also enabled us to integrate smaller, more efficient, more effective equipment such as the ceramic metal halide lamps into the fabric of schemes, hiding the lighting from view but creating greater impact on merchandise.

Being able to control the light, vary the lit environment and introduce colour change are also gifts technology has given us. Apocryphal evidence suggests that keeping customers in a selling environment longer, by entertaining them with images, colour and variation in effects, encourages higher sales. Sometimes the best results are the simplest. In the '80s when Philips White Son was first introduced, a trial area was installed above the flowers area in the Croydon branch of Marks & Spencer. The flowers consistently sold out. This impact was possible partly because the background lighting was so bland. I asked my fellow IALD members for their least favourite and favourite retail schemes. Emma Cogswell of Halo Lighting Design, preferred the River Island schemes of the early '80s, and the current dramatic Selfridges window displays. Her least favourite was Marks and Spencer.

As a favourite, Miles Pinniger enjoys Sephora - it's clever and practical. However, he feels that Marks and Spencer's current lighting strategy is unsympathetic to their retail aims.

My personal favourite is still the Spirit Zone in Selfridges because of the way it blends practical retail lighting with theatre. My least favourite has to be JJB Sports and all those sports shops with retina-burning over-lit schemes!

It would be good to say that lighting designers alone were responsible for the changes apparent in today's best retail lighting schemes; the attention to the composition of a lit picture, use of shadow, careful modelling of products, variation in light colour and intensity, movement and image projection. But although we have had quite a lot of influence, it has to said that the UK's primary position as a creative force in Europe is surely because there are more imaginative ideas floating around this island - simply due to numbers (I believe 75% of design education in Europe is focussed in the UK) and, of course, let's not forget financial necessity. Well designed lighting sells more stuff. Honest.

information : www.iald.org