Showroom Lighting: Making it easy for your clients to buy from you! by John Craig

I remember when I started out in sales in those heady days of 1987 when selling was all about K.I.S.S ie “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. The thoughts were that, if you over complicated your pitch, then all you were doing was giving the clients more reasons to say “no” to you simply because they either didn’t understand the message or you gave them so much to think about. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come to a decision. Either way, ‘keep it simple’ was the sales mantra that we all hung our hats on at the time, and to be fair, dependent on your product and your target audience, it did in the most part work and work well.

My reason for remembering the old K.I.S.S adage some thirty years on is quite simple and that is that I have been spending a lot of time recently working with clients on the use of lighting to improve either their individual kitchen/bedroom or bathroom displays or, in some cases, their full showroom. So why K.I.S.S then? Well it’s simple (no pun intended); when planning lighting for a display or a showroom there are a few points that you must concentrate on which are as follows:-

1) Lighting is used to draw attention to any design features that you wish to draw specific attention to.

2) Lighting is used to accentuate and enhance colours and textures on a display.

3) Lighting should be concentrated mainly on the displays themselves so that it draws attention to the products that you are selling, rather than relying on ceiling lighting to light up the whole showroom, therefore treating it as a building rather than a vehicle for selling. Let’s face it: industrial/commercial style lighting isn’t likely to be used in your potential clients homes so why use it in your showrooms?

4) It’s not about the form/shape/style of the light fitting itself anymore; it’s about the light emitting from it and how it works on the planes and surfaces of the display.

5) Choosing the very best colour temperature of the lighting which enhances the display to its very best is imperative, as is ensuring that there’s no light pollution spilling from one display to the next or, even more so, from the ceiling onto a display where the colour temperatures differ.

6) Making sure that the lighting on the display is the best type, e.g where dark work surfaces are concerned, then continuous light source is often the best, whereas in more traditional British style kitchens it could be that the use of LED spotlights is more aesthetically pleasing.

7) Lighting design is all about layering and ensuring that you plan your lighting in this way so that each area of lighting works with and not against another area.

8) Pendant lighting is a great way to not only enhance displays but also add to sales figures and profits. You need to ensure that you display pendant lighting wherever possible and where appropriate. The pendants you display must be available to you for you to sell, i.e. don’t just purchase a pendant light for aesthetic purposes as it’s another easy to sell product which makes you very good margins and adds to your portfolio of products and services that you offer your clients.

 

In summary this may seem like a very complicated and multi-faceted process, but the truth is that any lighting supplier worth their salt should not only be willing to assist you in planning this for you, they should be positively asking to do so. The better your showroom displays looks then the more likely the client is going to not only purchase it but say: “I want my kitchen/bedroom/bathroom to look just like that and I can just imagine that in my home!”… a case of a job very well done indeed!