How can you make the most of your shop?
The year is drawing to a close, and with it the festive season. Many shoppers will be going into shops to prepare for their New Year’s Eve celebrations. A strong visual identity is crucial to attracting potential customers, and one of the keys to this is good lighting to create an engaging atmosphere.
But what should you be looking out for? Here we answer three of the main questions you’ll face when installing or renovating the lighting in your business.
How do you work with natural light?
The first aspect to take into account when enhancing your shop is the amount of light that enters:
In your shop window or inside your business, we’ll opt for lighting that accentuates the front more than the back, or vice versa, depending on the situation. The aim: to highlight key areas.
For other parts of your shop, calibrate! Calibration means ensuring that the best possible overall level of brightness is maintained. Your aim will be to prevent areas from becoming dull or drab, and to avoid excessive shadows, while highlighting your main products with specific lighting.
What colour lighting is recommended?
There are many shades of lighting available today. The most commonly used is white. However, even within this there are nuances and variations: cool white, neutral white, cool warm white, extra warm white, etc.
Cool warm white lighting is ideal for a mini-market, organic food shop or delicatessen. A super-warm white is more suitable for a bakery, pastry shop or cheese shop. A fishmonger will opt for a “sparkling cold” or “crisp” white. Finally, a butcher will opt for a special “meat” shade of pinkish red to perfectly showcase his meats and charcuterie.
To select the shade that suits you best, call on our experts.
Which light sources should you choose?
LED lighting has become the norm, not only because of the energy savings it brings, but also because of the far superior quality of the light it produces compared with halogen or so-called “discharge” lighting.
LED track lighting with spotlights is recommended for optimum light distribution. They are therefore particularly useful for highlighting products in stalls (e.g. vegetables and fruit in a supermarket or grocery shop), and are very easy to install.
For fresh produce, we recommend the use of special LED food lighting that produces no heat and emits a warm, perfectly calibrated colour. It’s ideal for butchers, caterers, supermarket produce departments and bakeries.
For the walls and ceiling of your shop, there are numerous possibilities: visible or recessed LED spotlights, LED tiles, LED ribbons to highlight a false ceiling, or indirect lighting – all options that work together to give your shop a unique atmosphere.
Finally, for your functional spaces (warehouses, production workshops, etc.), there is a wide range of practical, bright industrial and semi-industrial solutions for effective lighting.
Lighting, a major challenge
Lighting is therefore a major factor in improving the visual quality of your business and enhancing your customers’ experience. By creating an attractive ambience, you’ll encourage many customers to walk through your doors. We’ve provided you with a few ideas for tackling this issue.
However, our advice is very general, and there are many additional factors specific to your shop that need to be taken into account. Setting up your lighting system is a complex activity, and it can be difficult to tackle such a challenge alone.
