Lighting as retail therapy

Lighting designer Dominic Meyrick's presentation, "Lighting for Retail Therapy: Light as an architectural tool," at the recent ARC 05 conference in London didn't offer "therapy" in the clinical sense. Rather, the content centered on some of the remedies that can cure ineffective and, in some cases, outright bad retail lighting.

Meyrick heads a six-person group involved in a variety of retail, entertainment and institutional projects. Hoare Lea Lighting is specialty practice affiliated with Hoare Lea Consulting Engineers, the U.K.'s largest mechanical/electrical engineering consultancy, headquartered in London and founded in 1862.

"A retailer recently asked me, 'If I spend more money on lighting, will my sales increase?' We can't provide a direct answer to that question," Meyrick said. "What we can offer is a framework by which to judge lighting's effect on the fundamentals of retailing: attracting the customer, helping to initiate the purchase and completing the sale."

Meyrick draws on his experience with clients' programs to attract more sophisticated customers who bring with them higher levels of expectation for the shopping experience. "The task at hand," he advised, "is to get merchants to go beyond 'How bright?' and, 'Is more lighting better?' Rather, retailers need to know more about responses to the question, 'How does lighting attract people to the goods on display?'"

Meyrick's presentation was prompted in part by a conversation with Stephen Lawler, group retail director for London-based Value Retail, operator of eight high-end luxury outlet villages in major European markets. Lawler is mounting a Value Retail-sponsored program to develop standards for shop design with an emphasis on lighting. "Value Retail's success is linked directly to the strong performance of its brands," Lawler said. "Dedicated retail teams at every Village [the off-price malls the company runs] advise individual stores in such matters as stock supply, pricing, merchandising, shop design, customer service, staff sourcing and training. Our goal is to maximize the presentation and performance of each shop, and improve the offer of the entire Village," he pointed out.

Lawler and Meyrick agreed that most retailers have a poor understanding of lighting. "It is to our benefit to help individual retailers optimize their performance," Lawler said. "We have a very strong hands-on approach to the appearance of our retail tenants," he added. "Dominic's presentation is a working guideline for the lighting section of a store design concept book that will be part of a new lease welcome pack we are preparing to give to our tenants," Lawler said.

Two widespread problems that Meyrick observes are poor lighting in dressing rooms and excessive reflective light from surfaces. "Unflattering fluorescent lighting in dressing rooms can make the customer think she looks so bad that she'll forget why she brought the dress in to try on in the first place. She'll put the dress back on the rack and go home unhappy," he said. In large stores, Meyrick has noticed that artificial illumination reflected off of polished surfaces can create an over-bright selling environment. "In this case, the customer doesn't know what to look at if everything is at the same brightness level," he noted.

Meyrick pointed out that flexible lighting systems now available give retailers the ability to change merchandise display layouts without compromising a distinctive illumination design. For a Safeway store in the United Kingdom, one system from Swiss maker Optelma integrates lighting into modular shelving. Curved metal supports extend the housing containing fluorescent lamps above and out over the top row of products. Power is supplied from floor outlets. The number of ceiling fixtures is minimal. "The lighting moves with the display when the retailer wants to change the configuration of the selling floor," Meyrick described.

V. Shop, a prototype launched by the Virgin organization, had a black painted background and curved red full-height wall-mounted display units. "The lighting challenge here was to make the space look cheerful, illuminate very small items all of similar size, and do it inexpensively," Meyrick described. Using ceiling-suspended Optelma systems, spots beamed down onto the 10 rows of product on the wall shelves. Displays down the center of the store were accented by a trio of circular luminaries. (Virgin did not roll out the concept, Meyrick noted, citing fierce competition from its own Virgin Megastores and HMV.)

For Gibo, a high-end boutique on London's New Bond Street, Meyrick designed gallery-style lighting. To give architectural definition to the large skylights and make the long, narrow space appear wider, he used color-changing LEDs overhead and along one wall. On the opposite wall, hand-painted decorative panels were lit with recessed downlights that produced a scallop pattern and brighter accent lights for displayed products. "The effect was theatrical and also energy-efficient," said Meyrick.

Meyrick is a strong proponent of utilizing computer technology to help clients visualize the end result of a proposed lighting scheme. "An informed client is an intelligent client," he said. For the shopping arcade at the Manchester Airport, Meyrick proposed colorful blue/violet strip lighting for the ceiling and uplights above the sign stripe over the windows and entry to the individual stores. The computer-generated rendering was instrumental in selling the concept to the client.

"Actually, the finished project looks very much like the rendering," Meyrick pointed out. "There isn't a tungsten lamp in the place, which is in operation 24/7. LEDs that now have a predictable life of 50,000 to 60,000 hours, and provide the color." Graceful Italian-made floor-mounted poles are fitted with pairs of HID luminaires that reflect light off curved white metal panels on to the polished floor surface.

Lawler of Value Retail plans to have the retailer's guidelines book available for distribution by later this year. "It will be a valuable addition to our ongoing day-to-day relationships with the brands on our sites. Dominic understands a store operator's misconceptions about lighting. They will appreciate being given clear explanations and suggestions on how to provide better lighting in their shops," said Lawler.

Photo by: Courtesy of Dominic Meyrick, Hoare Lea Lighting