RUNNING THE BUSINESS
The Whys & Hows of Lighting
Light your merchandise well, and it will sell!
BY LINDA CAHAN
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We can’t fight our evolutionary instincts when it comes to lighting. We are in essence animals, and as animals, we require a feeling of safety when we choose to enter a space — or a cave. I love to shop, but two of my favorite stores lost me as a regular customer because of their overhead lighting. One of the stores changed locations, and the lighting in their new space is about half of what it was. Now, when I walk in, I get annoyed and frustrated as I feel like I’m shopping in a dark cave. The other store had metal halide “natural sunlight” HID lights that made everything look flat and cheap. It was irritating to look at high-quality goods with this ultrabright white light. Nothing looked appealing. Their awful lighting saved me a lot of money. That store closed recently, and I wondered what took it so long as it was almost always empty.
Did you know that as we age, everything looks dimmer? A person over 50 will perceive your showroom as if they are wearing dark sunglasses compared to someone under 40. People’s eyes age differently, so these timelines are a guesstimate, but the concept is simple — people middle-aged and older need significantly more light to see than younger people.
The science is simple — our pupils get smaller the longer we’re on this planet. “These muscles weaken with age, making the pupils smaller and allowing less light into the eyes. For this reason, you need more light to see comfortably,” explains Dr. Haley Italia, an optometrist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear.
By the time you turn 60, your pupils may decrease to about one-third of the size they were when you were 20. Pupils may react more slowly in response to darkness or bright light, which is why when we walk into a store from the outside, our eyes react more slowly to changes in light. At any age, the photoreceptors in our eyes need time to adjust when we walk into a dark room from a bright room.
In older people, this process unfortunately takes much longer. Our pupils start to shrink around middle age, with a gradual decrease in size. By the time we reach our 60s, the muscles controlling the pupils weaken, and they decrease to about one-third of the size they were in our 20s. This is why the dark sunglasses comparison makes sense. This is a painless natural aging process, and most people are unaware of the vision loss as we can still see — we just need more light to do so. We realize this when we walk into a store that’s poorly lit and then become frustrated when we can’t read the signs near the RVs or on the product shelves.
Ideally, the last thing you want to do is annoy your middle-aged or older customers with a dim environment, but as we know, lighting is expensive. There’s no way around it. If you inherit a store with overhead fluorescent lights and you decide to save money by figuring they’ll “work” for now, chances are excellent that you will live with those lights for many years. It always pays off if you take care of the lighting during the build-out. If you’re moving into a new space, add a good mix of lighting before you open and you won’t have to worry about it for many years. Save yourself some money by not lighting the aisles unless you have level changes. Light your merchandise well, and it will sell!
What Is Good Lighting?
There is dramatic lighting, sufficient lighting and just plain dark, dull areas. According to Seanette Corkill, an excellent retail designer and lighting expert (frontdoorback.com), “They don’t call it mood lighting for nothing!” If you’re dealing with preexisting overhead fluorescent lights from when you moved into your showroom and retail area, you have the basics — flat, semi-bright lights that essentially light up the air. But to make sales, you need to add emphasis and “create the drama.” According to Corkill, “Sameness in lighting volume sucks the life out of the space, making it difficult to see what matters. You have to add specialty lighting to highlight focal areas on the selling floor and walls.”
Put your money into lighting up the perimeter of the accessories and chemicals areas so customers can see the places in those areas they want to go to. “You don’t need to take out the fluorescents, just add track to create more dramatic lighting.”
Lighting specifics:
When you are buying LED lights you can choose your beam spreads — how wide the beam shows up on the wall or floor fixture. A spotlight will generally spread about 20 inches while a floodlight (depending on the angle) can light up to 9 feet. If you overlap the spotlight on either side of the floodlight, you’ll get a more visually interesting wall plus you can highlight the newer or more expensive merchandise with the spots. For a 10-foot wall area, you can use a floodlight in the center of the track and a spotlight on either side about 3 or 4 feet away from the center. Please don’t buy “daylight” lights as they are too blue/white and very cold feeling. “Warmer” lights may seem like they could be better for accessories and too soft for chemicals, but if they are positioned correctly, they will light up your walls and your RVs perfectly, and your merchandise will sell well to people of all ages.
Where to hang the track for the best lighting:
If you are showing RVs inside your dealership, each unit deserves its own set of track lights overhead. Ideally, install one line of track on either side of the RV positioned 3 to 4 feet above the RV roof, and 3 to 4 inches out from the sides. This will give you the opportunity to light up the sides of each unit and make it pop! You don’t need a lot of light bulbs — a floodlight can spread about 9 feet, so you may only need two or three per side depending on the length of the RV. Just make sure the lights beams overlap so there are no dark areas. For your accessories/chemicals area, you want to make sure you’re highlighting the faces of the products on both the walls and floor fixtures. Small lengths of track may need to be used to make sure each fixture is well-lit. If you have any specific focal areas, and I hope you do, each focal area gets its own spotlight or several lights depending on how wide it is.
What type of LED spot and floodlights should you use?
Corkill from Frontdoor Back described the different type of bulbs with a perfect example: PAR-style lamps (the name for bulbs) have a flat front with little facets that harness the light like a jet nozzle on your garden hose. The curved bulbs are more like misters as their light is highly diffused. Only buy PAR LEDs! The best color of these bulbs/lamps are between the 2700 and 3000 kelvins range. If you have lighting that is 5000 kelvins, it’s going to be too bright, too white and everything will look flat.
Investing in good lighting will definitely help sell your merchandise. It’s worth the money!
Cheat Sheet:
- Light for the oldest of your customers. They will appreciate it, and your younger customers will as well.
- Add PAR LEDs in 2700 kelvins to a maximum of 3000 kelvins.
- Don’t buy “daylight” bulbs or any bulbs with a curved surface.
- Spotlights and floodlights are positioned 3 to 4 feet out from the face of your fixtures and 3 to 4 feet up from the fixture tops.
- Adjust the light fixtures so they don’t blind anyone!
- Light your merchandise, not your floors, unless you need light on a level change.
- If you have fluorescent lights, make sure they are all the exact same color rendition. Warm is better than daylight. You don’t want a polka-dot ceiling!
Linda Cahan is the president of Portland, Oregon-based Cahan & Co., a consulting firm that works with retailers of all sizes and categories to improve their bottom line through affordable and appropriate visual merchandising, store design and renovations. For more information, visit lindacahan.com.
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