Retail & Display Lighting

Retail lighting is judged on one thing: whether the merchandise looks like it does in daylight. That is a color rendering question before it is a brightness question — 95+ CRI with strong R9 for anything with red, timber, leather or skin tones in it, and consistent color between every fixture the customer can see at once.

Contrast does the selling. An evenly lit shop reads as a warehouse; the goods need to sit brighter than their surroundings, usually by a factor of three or more, which means the display strip and the ambient strip are different specifications rather than the same one at different lengths.

Case lighting has its own constraint. Inside a sealed vitrine there is nowhere for heat to go, and heat is what shifts color and shortens life — thermal path and driver location matter more in a case than anywhere else in the store.