What is Retail Uplighting?
Uplighting is an effective retail lighting technique in which lighting is strategically placed on display surfaces, on the shelf edge, or below shelving or products and aimed upwards to highlight specific areas or features. Uplighting, like all directional retail lighting, is a powerful retail sales tool in many ways. It empowers store owners to direct shoppers’ attention toward specific products and even architectural features of their store.
Uplighting can do much more than simply make a product more visually appealing and draw attention to it. When it’s done well, uplighting contributes to a sense of ambiance and atmosphere design in your store. We’ve discussed the ways in which the psychological impact of great retail lighting can influence the shopper’s experience in a previous post.
How Retail Uplighting Can Create Modern, Luxurious Ambiance
The psychological effect of effective store lighting is an important consideration that deserves more attention. In fact, it’s perhaps the most often overlooked advantage of upgrading your retail lighting. Retailers routinely focus on retail lighting from a utility perspective alone.
In designing your shoppers’ experience, it’s helpful to consider the way lighting contributes to the ambiance of browsing aisles and the subconscious effects lighting evokes. Uplighting in particular can be used to create a dramatic mood and showcase premium products, giving them an aura-like effect. The transformational effect uplighting can have on a display, and by extension, your sales, can be surprising.
How LED Lighting Has Made Better Uplighting Possible
Retail lighting has evolved rapidly in just the past 20 years, and LED lighting has ushered in new best practices across all retail channels. LED lighting is probably the single most influential technology trend in retail lighting in recent memory. LED lighting has made all sorts of uplighting fixtures and effects possible that weren’t available before.
With much lower energy consumption and lower heat production, LEDs have encouraged retailers and shop owners to add uplighting in places where they simply wouldn’t have been able to in the past. For example, our Uplighting LED panels are an incredibly versatile design option in which illumination emanates from the panel and makes shelving surfaces appear to glow with captivating light. Any assortments placed on uplit panels are then center stage for an outstanding performance.
Our new Q-channel lighting option includes uplighting integrated into its design. The Q-Channel’s simple shelf front-edge snap-on design makes it easy to install in just seconds, and breathes new life into your shelf displays — illuminating both up and down. The LED solution includes its own pricing ID channel and is almost invisible to shoppers. All they see is the lighting effect showcasing your featured products on the shelf (above) and below the next shelf. Now that LED retail lighting technology has made entirely new scenarios possible, retailers are using it to great advantage and uplighting treatments are a great example of this.
What Great Retail Uplighting Can Do For You
Highlight Key Product Features
Uplighting can be used to illuminate specific products or displays, directing extra shopper attention to them. This is particularly effective for high-value or featured items. Uplighting has a dramatic effect that can capture someone’s eyes the moment they enter the store, and invite them to browse longer (dwell time) as they make new discoveries.
Create Atmosphere and Ambiance
Retail store lighting plays a significant role in creating an atmosphere and setting a mood. Uplighting creates a warm, inviting glow that can make a space feel larger, or add dramatic effects to shelving or architectural elements you want to highlight. Uplighting conveys elegance and modernity.
Enhance Product Appearance
Effective lighting is especially critical for premium and luxury goods. The right lighting can accentuate texture and form. It makes the quality of premium materials more evident. Uplighting can also bring out the shimmer in a product’s packaging, illuminate attractive bottles and label designs, and use contrast to create attention-grabbing depth to your display
Make Window Displays That ‘Pop’
Uplighting is especially effective in window displays, it can be used to create a scene that draws passersby to your window merchandising and products on display. Well-lit window displays are a great way to project the ambiance of your store out into the world. This is a simple way you can reach hundreds more eyes on a busy sidewalk and entice people to enter your store.
Modern Lighting Solutions That Deliver Results
At Lighting for Impact, we do more than sell lighting. We sell solutions for retail. Lighting offers much more than mere utility. The right lighting can completely transform the look and feel of your store — and measurably boost sales and profitability. We invite you to visit our Media Library for a large selection of downloadable PDFs that showcase our broad range of LED lighting solutions for specific applications.
If you have questions about uplighting or any of our retail lighting solutions, please contact us online or call us at (844) 218-4112.
