Brands use this method to emphasise their prestige. Do you know this method?

Let’s begin with an exercise. Read the sentence below:
“Attract attention and create a pleasant atmosphere in the interior.”
What would you add to this sentence to make it a universal recipe for increasing the number of visitors in your store?
The correct answer is: There is no universal recipe. Whoever claims there is concocting an elaborate ruse. For the above sentence to hold any truth, it needs to be formulated a bit differently:

“Attract the attention of the right customers and create an atmosphere adequate to their financial status”.

Today’s article will discuss this adequacy.

Prestige in the retail industry. Meeting individual needs

Do you want your store to look more prestigious? Before we tell you how to do this, think for a second:
what prestige do your customers expect? Remember, not everyone wants to emphasize their social status in the same way.
For the richest social groups, the best fabrics, high-quality service, and a well-known brand would be important while for the middle class, things like sustainable production may be more crucial – they emphasize their social responsibility.
However, prestige is perhaps desired the most by the people with a lower social status. Says a specialist in Social Stratification from the Polish Academy of Science, Professor Henryk Domański, “Demonstrating uniqueness by representatives of the lower ranks of the social hierarchy allows them to prove to themselves and others that they are not inferior.”
How can you convince individuals from diverse social groups that they will find “their” prestige in your store? Consider a simple trick that we have been using for years in building the image of our clients.

Correlating store lighting with price and quality grading – in examples

Have you ever noticed lighting fixtures in the most expensive and exclusive boutiques? Probably not. Why? Because they are discreetly integrated into the finishing layers of the ceiling. This ties in closely with the method we mentioned at the outset of this article.

The more luxurious the character of the brand, the less visible the lighting fixtures are.

You don’t have to look far for the evidence – let’s take the flagship brands of Inditex as an example. These include Uterqüe, Massimo Dutti, Zara, Oysho, Pull & Bear, Bershka, etc. The next time you visit a shopping center, take a look at how each uses light in their shops and boutiques.

Why do premium brands minimize the amount of lighting fixtures?

When someone important speaks, everyone goes silent. It works similarly with the most expensive high-quality products – they play the main role in space. That is why other elements of the interior (including lighting fixtures) “go silent” – to give voice to fabrics, silhouettes, and stylizations.
But minimalistic lighting points are not only a matter of aesthetics. Most of the retail spaces in shopping malls are over 3 meters high. For large shops, installing a suspended ceiling in which you can “hide” the lighting fixtures is simply an additional cost. Only those brands that have to be consistent in building a premium image decide to do so.

If not the suspended ceiling, that what?

In the case of stores that reach the middle class with their offer, other values are important. Customers want to have a large selection of products, the opportunity to stylistically distinguish themselves, and to emphasize not only their wealth but also their unique character. Interior aesthetics is still important, but you can allow much more freedom.
In the case of Zara and stores of similar rank, lighting fixtures are camouflaged – the space above the lighting installation remains open, but it is optically masked. One tactic is to install openwork ceilings (bars or stripes) – when viewed at an angle, they give the illusion of a uniform space. The lighting is mounted in them.
You can also mask technical solutions by painting the space above the lighting fixtures black – at first glance, only the points of light are visible, not the entire wiring. Thanks to this, there is a compromise between exclusive minimalism and the fashionable character of the interior.

How to hide low price with lighting?

Customers who stroll around the shopping center need to know in which store they will feel comfortable and where they will get what they are looking for. The youngest of them, whose account balance is usually small, receive a clear message thanks to the appropriate sets of visual merchandising tools: “Here you can be yourself and no one will look down on you”.
Louder music, blunt advertising slogans, expressive decorations – all these should be unambiguous. In this case, industrial accents will be a perfect replacement for chic, high-end minimalism. Coherent with such a “narrative”, the interior will also contain visible (sometimes even striking) lighting fixtures – there is no need to generate costs for suspending ceilings or painting the space above the main lamps.

Lighting design for the premium brand

If you have already specified what the word “prestige” means for your customers, commission us to an adequate lighting design. We will prepare a solution for you that not only perfectly illuminates the space, but also takes care of such elements as color saturation, light intensity ratio, and maintaining the contrast between the background and the display. All this works towards increasing the number of visits and conversions in your store.