In a retail store, the most important thing after the merchandise on sale is the lighting. Indeed, good lighting highlights not only the design, but also the products. It is therefore important to combine lighting with store design.


There are two main types of lighting in a store: general lights and accent lights.


General Lighting

General lights allow us to have an average level of brightness maintained horizontally, as uniform as possible. This lighting must eliminate dark areas, allow customer traffic and space maintenance. Accepted levels for a trade are generally between 30 to 50 feet candle (FC) average, maintained at about 36" from the ground.


The main reason for limiting general lighting to 50 FC is to allow accent lighting to be visible to the naked eye at reasonable levels. Our visual system allow a clear distinction between levels ranging from 1 to 4 times. The example of 50 FC requires 200 FC in emphasis to be very visible, which is a lot of power and requires many powerful projectors. Finally, there is a cost accordingly.


There are, however, exceptions. A jewellery store, for example, will be more at 100 FC, or a store without accent lighting will be between 80 to 90 FC.


Accent Lighting

Accent lights are used to highlight what a merchant wants to sell the most. Its primary function is to capture the attention of people on these products.

The main way to implement this emphasis is with projectors with narrow medium beams on rails or with multiple or single adjustable recessed luminaires.

The required level will normally be 4 times our general lighting level. Accent lighting must target specific areas of items such as display cases, floor displays or often along store walls. We are talking here about an average level of lighting maintained vertically, because we usually look at the merchandise vertically.

We need to provide our customers with calculation results that incorporate data from maintained average lighting levels. The term "maintained average" specifies that the result is an average that takes into account a depreciation of the light source.

In short, good lighting in a business or shop makes it possible to highlight specific products without it being obvious to the bare eye of a consumer.