Light up customers' worlds

With a flip of the switch, your store goes from dark and unassuming to the go-to stop for discriminating gardeners - or does it? The first thing you do when you walk into your store in the morning can be one of the most important: turning on the lights. A properly lit store may make the difference between being perceived as a discount store or a high-quality boutique, and completely change customers’ experience.
 

Paint an appealing picture

According to Rinara Reh, lighting project manager at GE Lighting, when you’re deciding how to light your store, it’s important to first think about it conceptually. She relates it to a painting; you have layers such as a foreground and a background, with emphasis placed on the most important elements. “What I want to sell the most of, I want to be the brightest and have the most contrast,” says Reh.

Which product categories do you hope to sell the most of? What type of experience do you want customers to have in your store? Which areas do you want customers to be attracted to? What are your goals with your new lighting design? These are all questions you should have the answers to before embarking on a lighting redesign. If you decide to work with a lighting designer, “having that upfront discussion so that [the lighting designer] understands what you’re trying to achieve is critical to its success as well,” says Ryan Rodau, retail marketing manager at GE Lighting.
 

Light your retail “stage”

Lighting a display is akin to lighting a stage. Your plants or products are the actors, and the light should come from the same side as the audience. In other words, the light source should be aimed toward the display, and the light source should not be facing customers. “The ideal way would be to light it from two sides, from above and from left and right and aim it at the center, so you’re almost creating this triangle,” Reh says.

Be careful to avoid “glary” light sources, or those that are “offensive when you look up or see them in the corner of your eye,” says Rodau. “You’re not going to sell a lot of merchandise when people are uncomfortable in your stores and want to leave because of the lighting.” One way to avoid glare is to use several smaller lamps as opposed to a few, larger lamps in a display.
 

Sharpen your focus

Since one of the objectives of specialized lighting designs is to attract customers’ attention to certain areas more than others, it’s worth it to take the time to decide which displays you’d like customers to focus on. “I think about where the highs and lows are, where are the important display tables are in a shop environment, and I want to make sure that those tables and those displays are more brightly illuminated than others that are maybe less important,” says Amy Laughead-Riese, principal and lighting designer at 37 Volts. “It may not make sense for me to brightly illuminate a clearance rack, but it would make more sense to brightly illuminate the freshest new trend displays that I’m displaying to the customer.”
 

Render them impressed

Colorful displays attract people like a moth to a flame, says Reh. Colored lighting that makes plants look brown or dull the bright colors of your garden ornaments won’t help move those products. That’s where color rendering, or the ability of a light source to render color, comes into play. According to Laughead-Riese, the most perfect source of color rendering is the sun. However, for those places in the store where it’s not possible to use natural sunlight, you should select lamps based on their Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. A lamp with a high rating on the CRI will make colors look truer and more saturated. A lamp with a low rating on the CRI will give the illusion that the product’s color is different in the store as opposed to when customers get it home, where the lighting may be different. “If it’s going to be a display with plants that will be in customers’ homes, it would be good to have [lighting] that would mirror that in the retail store,” Rodau says. Reh suggests a lamp that has a CRI rating of 70 and above to ensure that colors stay true.

If you’re purchasing the commercial-grade lamps yourself, you can find more information about the its CRI rating on the Lighting Facts Label on the product’s packaging. This label also contains information about the wattage, efficiency, and Correlated Color Temperature (whether it’s a “cool” or “warm” color). Read more about the Lighting Facts Label at www.lightingfacts.com.
 

Change perceptions with lighting

If you’re like most independent retailers, you strive to create an experience for customers that cannot be easily replicated by the big box or discount stores. The look and feel of the store can often sway customers’ opinions about the business as a whole. In addition to the more obvious characteristics, such as keeping a neat and clean retail floor and creating tidy and attractive displays, lighting plays a key role in how customers perceive your store.

Reh compares big box retail store lighting and boutique lighting to dining in a fast food restaurant versus a higher-end restaurant. “If you go into a fast food restaurant or a cafeteria, you have a brighter, more uniform lighting, and when you go to a very fancy restaurant, the light levels will go down as the price [goes up] on the menu,” she says. “If you go into your big box retail store, you have tall ceilings and very bright, uniform light. If you go into a boutique, all of a sudden the light levels go down and there’s a lot more contrast.” People tend to perceive stores with high contrast and lower light levels as being more boutique-like. She suggests having a smaller display at the front of the main retail room that’s uses dimmer overall lighting and higher product lighting to create contrast and a boutique look that will attract customers into the store. “In those types of displays, the more highly, intensely illuminated they are, [the more they] will attract that customer to the table, especially if there are products that have reflectivity to them or are shiny,” says Laughead-Riese.

If the look you’re going for is somewhere in between big box and boutique, your lighting design will also be a compromise between the two extremes. “Most of the clothing stores do pretty well [with this],” Reh says. “I think Gap does it well, because they have both general ambient lighting and track lighting in displays with their mannequins. Any gardening store can be lit similarly.”

Whether your goal is to light a path from the parking lot to the store, or to make the most of your existing displays with a new lighting design, proper lighting is an important part of a successful garden center.