RETAIL LIGHTING

Professional Retail Lighting for Stores & Shop Windows

Effective shop lighting enhances the appeal of products in sales areas such as bakeries, grocery stores, fashion shops, and bookstores. It helps to guide the viewer's focus and provides orientation while presenting the product range in its most favourable light. A key recommendation for shop lighting is a colour rendering index (CRI) of at least 80 Ra to reproduce the colour spectrum of the goods optimally.

Shop Retail Lighting

Why is lighting design crucial for the retail sector?

To implement an effective shop lighting design that considers both technical specifications and the unique characteristics of the location, it's advisable to consult with a lighting professional. It's vital to not only highlight the merchandise but also create an inviting shopping experience for customers. Experienced lighting designers can help you to choose the ideal lighting technologies, such as energy-efficient LED lighting and human-centric lighting (HCL), which autonomously adapts brightness and colour temperature throughout the day to align with people's natural circadian rhythms.

What do you need to consider for retail lighting?

General Lighting

General lighting ensures basic and consistent brightness throughout the entire shop area. Commonly used lighting types include:

Accent Lighting

Accent lighting is used to illuminate specific product areas or individual goods, for example, the display area for the current bestsellers in a bookshop. This lighting type aims at directing the customer's perception and includes:

Shop Window Lighting

The shop window is usually the first point of contact with potential customers and can influence their purchase decisions. Lighting helps to highlight specific products, for example, through a dynamic interplay of light and shadow.

The lighting colour temperature plays a significant role in retail lighting. Cool light colours above 4,000 Kelvin represent freshness and dynamism, while warm light colours of up to 3,000 Kelvin create a cosy, feel-good ambience.

Track lighting for shops

Track systems provide increased flexibility and convenience, as spotlights or pendant lights can be positioned anywhere on a ceiling-mounted track. It's important to differentiate between low-voltage and high-voltage systems. In the high-voltage range, a further distinction is made between single-circuit tracks and multiple-circuit tracks, e.g., 3-phase tracks.

The difference between single and multiple phases is that with a single-phase system, the lights can only be operated together, e.g. switching them on and off. There are practical systems from varied brands that include all required components - an option that is often used by private customers.

3-phase systems offer more flexibility as a group of lights can be controlled independently from the other lights on the track. With some systems (e.g. track lighting by Arcchio), it's even possible to combine track lighting from different manufacturers.

To the track lighting systems

Technical aspects

Colour Rendering Index (CRI)

The colour rendering index (CRI) is specified in Ra and indicates how well a light source renders colours compared to natural daylight on a scale from 0 to 100. 100 Ra represents excellent colour rendering and is currently only achieved by halogen lamps. However, high-quality LED lighting with around 80 Ra already appears very natural.
Values below 80 Ra should not be used for shop lighting to avoid unappealing, unnatural colours. This is particularly relevant in the fashion industry as a false representation of colours negatively impacts customer satisfaction and return rate.

Light colour

Another key factor in shop lighting is the colour temperature, commonly referred to as light colour, which has a major influence on how goods are perceived.
Depending on the colour temperature indicated in Kelvin (K), the light can appear bright and cool with a bluish daylight cast or warm and reddish with a soft white glow.
In supermarkets, the lighting colour temperatures are selected specifically for different products, for example, warm white (2,700K) for crispy bread rolls.

Shop retail lighting

Single Spotlights

Display Lights

Pendant Lights

LED Strip Lights

Legal requirements

For lighting in retail, legal regulations must be observed. The basic brightness in the shop must be at least 300 lux, and 500 lux in the checkout area. For reasons of customer comfort, certain areas can, of course, exceed the legal standards. This can be the case in bookshops where bright lighting for customers to browse through literature is desired.