Strike up the brand

In its 36 years of existence, South Deerfield, Mass.-based The Yankee Candle Co. Inc. has grown to be a household name in the scented premium candle and accessories market. The company designs, produces and distributes fragrance-imbued candles, holders and accessories, home décor and seasonal items. Last year, Yankee Candle sold more than 80 million candles in 160 scents, thanks largely to the ever-growing popularity of candles. The first prototype of Yankee Candle's livelier, more contemporary retail face for new stores debuted in Marlton Square, Marlton, N.J., in the spring. It was followed by a retrofitted store in the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania, which implements aspects of the new store prototype. Yankee Candle called on JGA Inc., a design firm based in Southfield, Mich., for the space's interior design and architecture, and Impact Illumination, a division of Lenexa, Kan.-based Henderson Engineers, created the lighting plan.

The unveiling of the new 2,000-sq.-ft. store design is an important segment of the company's overall strategy to strengthen the retail sector's contribution to total corporate revenues. "Yankee Candle sees retail growth coming from previously non-traditional areas for their products, such as the South and West," says Ken Nisch, JGA's chairman. "Their approach is to boost sales by attracting new customers for their expanding product line. Many of their existing stores feel more like a dimly lit general store. The concept for the new design is to let the customer know that there's something new at Yankee Candle: a new shopping experience…more lifestyle, more to do, more to buy," he explains. New contemporary fixturing and a precise lighting plan combine to produce a selling environment that is both modern and friendly.

Crisp, white, wall display fixtures create a dimensional outline for the many colors and shapes of Yankee Candle's product offering. For the prototype, textures typically found in the home—slate, painted wood, brick, stone and decorative plaster—combine for a fresh environmental palette in a retail space.

A challenge for JGA and Impact Illumination was how to present high-density displays of products with much the same scale and proportion. The solution, they agreed, was to "landscape" the store. Nisch compares it to the design of a garden, with areas of vertical and horizontal visual interest. "The use of trellises, the grouping of planting beds by color and contrast of the blooms, and varying the height of the plantings so that the taller flowers and shrubs are a backdrop for the rest of the garden was a starting point for conceiving the store's environment," Nisch explains. "The light-colored wall fixtures frame the space, with the products displayed in color-coordinated groupings, like flowers in bloom." Floor-to-ceiling tapered pylons represent trees, along with the open-metal pole elements for graphics and product displays. The two- and three-level freestanding units, which can be quickly remerchandised and relocated on the selling floor, become like foreground objects in a garden, functioning here like seasonal changes in the annual cycle of plants and blooming shrubbery.

Julie Pierce, director of design for Impact Illumination, and her colleague, Chris Leech, lighting designer, integrated energy-saving technology with a lighting program that would evoke the subtlety of candlelight and still emphasize featured merchandise. "The effect on the selling floor is layers of light rather than one ambient level that would tend to flatten the appearance of the product arrangements and reduce the impact of their dimensionality," Pierce says.

The highly textured character of the interior finishes further augments this sense of shadow and light, as does the interplay of opaque and translucent wall surfaces. "We layered the lighting and focused the levels of illumination so each product grouping would be distinctive and make its own statement to the shopper," Leech says.

Wall-hung shelves are positioned approximately 4 in. out from the wall around the perimeter of the store to allow illumination to graze the surface from behind. Hidden from the customer's view, luminaires with T4 metal halide lamps at floor level bounce light upward. "It's an uplighting effect, like the glow from a candle," says Pierce.

For track and recessed downlights, the designers selected fixtures that maintain a constant distribution pattern. "The distribution of the light is controlled by the reflectors, not the lamps," Pierce explains. Their warm golden tones are flattering to the residential mood of the new Yankee Candle stores, she adds.

Smaller luminaire profiles and ballasts make the fixtures blend in with the ceiling. They are fitted with Philips 39-watt T6 MasterColor metal halide lamps. Recessed ceiling fixtures add soft filtered light to the selling floor. In the Marlton Square store, ceiling-hung baffles give additional focus to the illumination of the freestanding displays on the selling floor.

Natural-finish wood floors accented with a stone band, and two- and three-tier display fixtures with warm finishes provide contrast to the white backdrop that frames the store. "The floorplan that is integrated with the lighting plan creates the elements of order and discovery needed for a merchandise assortment of Yankee Candle's breadth," Nisch indicates. These include the votive display, floor-to-ceiling jar tower and impulse displays around the store's point-of-sale locations.

Pierce says that one of the technical lighting design challenges for the prototype is to ensure it will meet energy-use criteria. New technologies in lamps and luminaire design make it possible to meet the ASHRAE 90.1 energy code while providing a sales-enhancing lighting plan, she points out. Actual watts per sq. ft. for the Marlton Square store is 3.4; the general lighting level is 1.9 watts/sq. ft., while 1.6 watts/sq. ft. was achieved for displays.

Currently, the rollout of 30 to 40 Yankee Candle stores based on the 2,000-sq.-ft. prototype design is underway.