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

A new building project is on the horizon. Between designing, budgeting, and scheduling, getting the project off to the right start can be one of the biggest challenges.

Often, the more complex the project, the more likely it is that challenges will arise.

Our team handles thousands of lighting projects every year, and a common question we get is whether a customer should go all-in with a single manufacturer or diversify their lighting across multiple manufacturers.

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 projects. But when it comes to lighting, the company isn’t sure who should purchase the products.

When you're in the business of opening beautiful places – be they retail stores, restaurants, office buildings, or apartment complexes – life can feel like a game of compromises. 

Typically, you have four main objectives: meet building code, maintain design intent, stay within budget, and open up on time. And oftentimes, achieving all four of those things feels like a pipe dream. Just choose two or three. Something almost always has to give.

It doesn't have to be that way.

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.

When making the decision to purchase a certain lighting product, are there any questions that matter more than price, availability, and timeline?

Perhaps that's the case with anything you order – how much does it cost, is it in stock, and when am I going to get it?

But the stakes can be pretty high when you're ordering lighting to get your building or store into shape before an executive visits or ahead of the holidays or when you're knee-deep in a national rollout schedule.

So, if you call Regency right now and purchase lighting, how long will it take to get your order?

One of our lighting specialists was recently working with a chief engineer at a commercial office who was scrambling to get a suite ready for a new tenant. The process was pretty typical, and the tenant was putting a share of their improvement funds toward lighting upgrades. 

But, as always with construction and remodeling, a problem surfaced: the lighting fixtures that the tenant's architect specified had a 6-8 week lead time, but the tenant was expecting to occupy the space in 4 weeks.

The chief engineer was caught in a pickle, and the manufacturer's rep the architect worked with on the spec had no similar alternatives to offer.

What products should you retrofit to LED first?

Our lighting experts get that question all the time. Fortunately, there’s a pretty simple answer. 

If you have any applications in your building that still have incandescent or halogen lighting, start there first. Why?

The retrofit from incandescent or halogen to LED gives you the biggest energy savings and almost always the fastest return on investment. We all want to make our money back quickly on investments, right? If you’re using linear or compact fluorescent lighting anywhere in your building, your lighting is already fairly efficient, especially when compared with incandescent or halogen lighting. 

There are some things in life that are inevitable: Death, taxes, and construction projects falling behind schedule.

Actually, one of those things is escapable with good practice and a stroke of luck.

Here at Regency, we are privileged to have some of the most skilled project managers in the industry but there's sometimes no ducking the inevitability of setback.

Before we go too much further, let's get this out of the way: this is not a laundry list of excuses or a pity party. The intent here is to address the most common snags that emerge over the course of a project while explaining how we mitigate them.  

We're lighting people over here, as you know, so we'll be looking specifically at lighting projects and the challenges that come with them, but the principles below could be broadly applied to most any construction project.

Alice + Olivia launched in 2002 as a women's fashion brand that was exclusively sold in Barneys New York. The company's steady growth over the last 15 years now has it selling its clothing in 50 different countries. And part of that growth has come through the brand's expansion to its own brick and mortar locations. 

Alice + Olivia opened its first boutiques in New York and Los Angeles in the mid-2000s and has since gone on to open 38 worldwide.