BY ELLIE DEES
You’ve installed some great LED signage to get customers inside your store, and it’s working! Congrats! Now, it’s time to upgrade the lighting inside the shop. In retail settings, lighting designers use LED products in four basic types of architectural lighting:
- Ambient lighting
Ambient lighting involves a store’s main lighting scheme, which needs to ensure that customers and employees are comfortable enough to shop and work, to see products, to read labels and to feel safe. The number of LED light fixtures needed and how bright they should be will largely depend on the size of a given space. A large, warehouse-style shop with high ceilings requires more lighting — and more powerful lights — since they will normally be set higher up and have more area to cover. A smaller store can achieve the same lighting levels with less powerful fixtures.
- Accent lighting
Retail lighting designers use accent lighting to highlight specific areas — to draw attention to key merchandise like new releases, sales items or seasonal products, whether they are on countertops, shelves or racks or in eye-catching window displays. Whether they are the seductive, warm tones of luxury or bright and festive, LED accent lighting fixtures are also very effectively used to create featured nooks and corners for specialty items.
- Task lighting
Task lighting is used in the parts of a store that naturally require more lighting. A tailor, for instance, needs good light to see while taking measurements. Department store customers need better light in changing rooms, so they can check the fit of any items they might try on. High-CRI LED lights are especially fit for the fitting room – so shoppers can see colors as they will look in natural light. The checkout areas require brighter lighting so that customers and cashiers can easily handle transactions. Task lighting is also often used to effectively highlight in-store signage and branding.
- Decorative lighting
Decorative lighting is less focused on practical illumination and more directly focused on appeal. It demands fixtures that create beautiful decorative light to set a certain mood in a given business. Decorative lighting is also used to invoke nostalgia — warmer white CCTs can recreate the glow of a Christmastime fireplace or gleaming LED-based neon fixtures can evoke the lustrous look of the 50s.
The beauty of working with LEDs is in their versatility. Modern LEDs can be custom fit to provide every type of lighting fixture a retail environment requires. From our myriad custom assembled channel and RibbonLyte combinations to grazers and wall washers to panel lighting, pendants, BackLyte and neon, Acolyte has a quality product to fit your specifications. You need custom lighting? We’ve got custom solutions. Check out our product catalog or see our stunning project gallery for more inspiration.
