Practical advice on commercial lighting from LED retrofits to lighting design.

When big shopping holidays like Black Friday and back-to-school shopping hit the retail world, it all too often means stores everywhere are scrambling to get the lighting right. 

Lighting is one of those things that can be easily taken for granted. It’s sort of like cell phone service or drinking water –– it’s not something most people pay attention to unless it’s off.

Just like cellular networks and purified drinking water, details matter in lighting. Ensuring a cell signal isn’t spotty or that the total dissolved soluble content of water is palatable is a science. And it’s pretty easy to mess up.

With lighting, mistakes rarely go unnoticed. And even the less-noticed ones can have a trickle-down effect on sales.

The job of the lighting designer is to help you avoid such oversights, ensuring your lighting is sharp, consistent, and right for your brand.

In that spirit, here are the most common mistakes our team sees in retail lighting design:

If you're responsible for determining the right ambiance and light quality of your application, then you probably already know how important understanding Color Rendering Index (CRI) and Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is.

Here's the problem: CRI and CCT are anything but easy to understand.

Color Rendering Index is calculated based on how well a light source renders eight specific pastel colors. The theory is if it light renders these colors well, it should render all colors well. CRI is a simple and helpful lighting spec to predict how good the visual output of a lighting product will be.

Correlated Color Temperature (CCT or just color temperature) gauges how yellow or blue light appears. It’s measured in Kelvin and usually falls in a range between 2200 and 6500 Kelvin degrees. Warm light sources have low color temperatures (2200-3000K), featuring red, orange, and yellow colors. Cool light sources have high color temperatures (>4000K) and feature blue light.

Properly aimed lighting is one of the most important, yet easily overlooked aspects of great retail design. Done correctly, it will accent the merchandise you want to sell and lead your customers through your store. Check out this step-by-step guide on aiming to make your store attractive to customers.

Last year, we published our first-ever LED Buying Guide. We say over and over again around here that our goal is to make lighting easy for our customers, and the LED Buying Guide was published with that objective in mind.

The lighting world has undergone rapid changes over the last decade with the emergence and proliferation of light emitting diode (LED) lighting technology. Just seven years ago, in 2010, less than 10 manufacturers made up 90 percent of the lighting market. Last year, that market share was spread between more than 400 manufacturers, each with its own fluid, iterative product line.

That's a lot to keep up with.

So, how do we make things easier for you?

About a year ago, I was on a Costco run, but was turned away when I arrived. It was the middle of the day and the whole store was shut down.

Care to guess why?

I’m not an average coffee drinker. I’m the obnoxiously picky kind of coffee drinker –– the guy who brings his own equipment to the office and refuses gas station and Starbucks coffee alike. This is not a point of pride for me anymore, really. It’s more of an Achilles’ heel, or a symptom of gross pretentiousness. (Sorry, co-workers. I’m a rotten, always-caffeinated monster.)

In the retail industry, high quality lighting is one area that can go overlooked or deemed superfluous. Glenn Trunley of TUMI knows the importance of high quality lighting and the benefit that it can bring to accomplishing store design goals.

Regency recently partnered with TUMI to bring specification consistency, standout design, and tailored budgetary solutions for an international rollout. 

Our lighting designers are frequently asked about color temperature and CRI. How important are these measurements to your lighting product decisions? 

With the emergence of LED lighting, the options have become almost limitless, so selecting the perfect color for your application can turn into an overwhelming endeavor.

Here’s a common dilemma: a company hires a general contractor to oversee a large-scale renovation or new construction buildout, or a series of such projects, but isn’t sure who should be responsible for purchasing the lighting for those projects.