Visual merchandising is immensely important as a tool to encourage customers to look at, perceive and buy your products. Lighting is one of the most important aspects taken into consideration by retailers, as it has a direct influence on customer’s mood, with 80% of the sensory information the brain receives comes from our eyes. Lighting impacts how we feel, what we think of a product and ultimately the choice of whether to purchase or not. It creates visual spaces, highlights architectural elements and product qualities.
Long gone those times when interior design and lighting were handled separately. Competition is getting stronger, standards are getting higher and brands start competing for customers on every level. Thus, we created a list of Success Lighting Stories in Retail, in order to exemplify, explain and inspire you to create your own success story.
Apple
Apple expressed its high-tech identity by the use of large surfaces back illumination, with cold colors, in such a way as to provide a highly uniformed and diffused light, which creates clean lines and a contemporary, up-to-the-minute environment. The retail team that takes care of Apple’s appearance believes uniform lighting provides the best way to showcase its technology products.
Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton has to work hard for keeping up their sophisticated image, thus they decided on using warm-toned, atmospheric lighting and halo-lit shelf systems. By doing so, they have created an atmosphere which leaves customers feeling pampered and well looked-after.
The Whisky Shop, London
Lighting in this shop is definitely used to tell a story, the close cooperation between interior and lighting design has resulted in a perfect harmony of branding and products, designing a space that emphasizes the feel of the whiskey and highlights a few of the fables behind the production of whiskey.
One of the fables states that angels are said to take a share of all whiskeys during the maturation process, with two per cent of the volume being lost with each year. That is why the producers played on this with their newly reconditioned stores featuring illuminated angel wings, giving customers an exquisite atmosphere and engaging them into the story behind this contrariwise tent-to-be-taught-of dull alcoholic beverage.
Fossil
Fossil is mainly known for its watches, but in the last few years they have evolved to selling a variety of clothing and accessories alongside watches in its growing fleet of retail shops. Enhanced LED-based lighting gives such retailers the possibility of increasing sales through a better presentation of their products. Amanda Ceja, procurement manager for store design and development at Fossil affirms “We love the crisp, clear way that VioLight [fixtures] light our space, produce a sharper visual and make our product pop”.
Grand Hyatt Hotels
Hotels like the Grand Hyatt in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood make the majority of their money through conventions and big events. So, naturally, it’s important to keep those areas up to date and well-maintained. If a group rents out multiple pricey meeting rooms, it’s surely not the best look to have light bulbs flickering and burning out right before, or during, their event. Those kinds of maintenance headaches were the real impulsion for the Grand Hyatt’s decision to retrofit their meeting area lighting to LED.
The Grand Hyatt possessed a total of 35,000 square feet of function space. In addition to new LED chandeliers which were installed throughout the hotel’s 9,700-square-foot Grand Ballroom, the Hyatt installed 738 new LED lamps throughout the space.
TUMI
TUMI is a global luggage brand with shops from Boston to Beijing. Therefore, having the perfect lighting in its new stores was a top priority for TUMI Sr. Director of Global Store Design, Glenn Trunley. “In the industry, at many levels, lighting is overlooked and sometimes seen as something that’s too expensive to really come up to the level that perhaps one would want,” Glenn explained. “In my estimation, it’s a critical piece of the overall store design.
It’s a critical piece in visual merchandising. “At the end of the day, our job is to make the product look great,” Glenn said “So we found a solution that really even made our darkest, dumbest black luggage look really, really good, and also maintained a really nice color spectrum through all of our more colorful merchandise.”
Arby’s
Founded in 1964, Arby’s is the first nationally franchised sandwich restaurant brand, with more than 3,300 restaurants worldwide. Their purpose is “Inspiring Smiles through Delicious Experiences.” Arby’s Restaurant Group received two awards from the Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign in recognition of efforts to improve energy efficiency at Arby’s restaurants through outdoor lighting initiatives. This award came as a result of substantial efforts by Arby’s, with sustenance from lighting partner Regency Lighting, to reduce electricity consumption in 92 company-owned restaurants’ parking lots.
As part of Arby’s award-winning Efficiency Matters program, metal halide lighting of high wattage was replaced with more effective LED lighting, in 1.7 million square feet of restaurant parking, including 3,490 parking spaces. The retrofit concluded in an average of 53% reduction in energy in participating Arby’s restaurants. Arby’s lighting campaign continues to develop, with more than 100 company-owned restaurants scheduled to undertake the retrofit by the end of the year 2015.
STAPLES Center & Microsoft Theater
The STAPLES Center is a major sports venue, home to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Clippers, and the Los Angeles Kings. Microsoft Theater, meanwhile, hosts a number of high-profile concerts and events, including The Emmys and The ESPY awards. They decided to upgrade to LED at the two venues, as it provides immensely superior light quality, compared to older options, such as metal halide and fluorescent lighting, that comparatively to LED, change in color and lose lumen output much more quickly.
The newer LED solutions offer illumination that is incredibly bright and evenly distributed, while still being comfortable on the eyes. The clear, pure illumination provides attendees with an enhanced viewing experience during entertainment events and allows them to witness every detail of a game or concert in stunning clarity.
Walmart
Walmart has decided to invest in LED ceiling light fixtures, after a successful pilot test of the all-LED concept across dozens of new and existing stores and supercenters in the United States, Latin America, Asia and the United Kingdom.
The company believes the fixtures on the main sales-floor involved in this commitment usually deem for 90% of the total lighting usage in a given retail store or grocery store layout, thus the impact is possibly huge in terms of energy efficiency improvements.
They estimate that in the United States alone, the switchover to this technology will reduce electricity consumption by an average of 340,000 kilowatt-hours (kWhs), generating approximately $34,000 in savings per year per store. Walmart has committed to cutting the kWh of electricity per square foot needed to run its buildings by 20% globally by 2020.
The Kroger Co.
This huge grocery chain is consistently making efforts to reduce cost and carbon. But, in recent years, they have managed to reduce its normalized carbon footprint by more than 5% since 2006. Kroger discovered that almost three-quarters of its carbon footprint is due to energy use and electricity the company purchases from utilities. However, since 2000, Kroger has reduced overall energy consumption in its stores by more than 27%.
That is enough electricity to power every single family home in Memphis, Tenn. for one year. One of Kroger’s new stores will consume today with less than 25% energy than a store built in 2000. Kroger is achieving this goal through various strategies, like replacing lighting with LED fixtures. These lights use 75% less energy. By the end of 2010, LED lighting has been installed in nearly every store.
