Across the high street, retailers are investing in their stores and exploring new ways to engage their customers. It’s a welcome antidote to the digital realm where everything is accessible with a swipe. Within the confines of a physical store, the customer is elevated to a guest, there to be nurtured and nourished by a multisensory experience.
Anyone who’s been to Selfridges or Battersea Power Station recently knows exactly what I’m talking about. Pioneering retail brands and destination developments have made us all reconsider the relevance of bricks-and-mortar retail. It’s expediated the creative process and brought retail design closer to the world of the theatre – a place where emotion, spontaneity, and interaction are integral to the action, and spaces are fluid and immersive. It’s heartening to see what can be achieved when a retailer and designer collaborate to produce an imaginative concept – something that defies definition yet succeeds in nurturing a strong sense of culture and connection.
Galeries Lafayette / Image © Galeries Lafayette & Cardy Papa
Multifaceted retail is a trend that’s only gaining momentum and it’s a creative arena where the lighting designer can add real value. Designing for people is our currency. We’re well-versed in designing for a full spectrum of behaviours and experiences, so there’s often a lot going on behind the finely curated scenes that we design. We can paint with broad brush strokes to create a lighting scheme packed with visual interest, ambience, and drama, then be quite precise how we finesse the design to create a meaningful dialogue between a customer and a space.
So, how do we shape the brand story and tune an emotional response?
Good lighting design always responds to people and answers a need. We master the hierarchy of the retail environment to deliver a space that’s easy to navigate and enjoyable to spend time in. Then, we accent and activate all the minute details. The mark of success here is the customer shouldn’t notice what we’ve done. Light should be omnipresent in a store, making the branded signage, merchandising displays, and focal points pop, and gently guiding people to explore interactive spaces, communal areas, and dwell points. Dynamic lighting has given designers the scope to design more creative and adaptive schemes, which use colour, intensity, and pattern to produce an immersive experience. In this context, light is an important strand of the full multisensory mix and can be used to create cues that influence people’s behaviour on an emotional level and leave a lasting impression.
Selfridges, Champagne Bar / Image © Selfridges Archive
Another vital part of our role is how we harness technology to make a space more efficient and incorporate personalisation into the design to make brand touchpoints more tailored. Occupancy and daylight sensors can drive down energy consumption and reduce a retailer’s carbon footprint by adjusting the lighting according to demand and when the required amount of natural light has been detected. We can also be quite tactical with smart lighting technology and design schemes that harvest data about a consumer and track their movement around a store. It’s about making the whole scheme resonate on a more meaningful level as next level retail is environments that read and respond to a customer, then self-adjust to give them what they want. Spaces should be efficient, intuitive, and evolving – and when lighting is employed as an organic system, as opposed to a necessary layer of provision, all of this can be achieved.
Ultimately, a well-executed piece of lighting design can have a positive impact by improving footfall, customer loyalty, and sales. It can be instrumental in a beauty store where you need the most optimum lighting scheme to enhance skin tone, or in a fashion environment where spatial fluidity is key, and the lighting needs to be tailored to personal styling sessions, content creation, and community events. It’s going to be about multidimensional experiences moving forward. As lighting is a beautiful solution in creating adaptable spaces, the retail sector is going to depend on it like never before.
