The right lighting for fitting rooms

Why only professional lighting belongs in a fitting room

Professional shop lighting is not a trend but a necessity. Boutiques spend a lot of money attracting and keeping customers, and once a customer has come in and decided to try something on, it is important not to lose them. A fitting room is not just a place to change and look in the mirror. It is where decisions are made. The retailer's task is not just to provide a mirror but to make the person like the clothes they have put on. Given that fitting rooms in modern shops are not very large, the only way to influence the choice is professional retail lighting. Light can make clothes look better, but many shadows and poor-quality light can also spoil the first impression.

Retail lighting today offers a large range of light sources, and it is easy to make mistakes when choosing lighting for fitting rooms. The luminaire can be badly placed, for example. Because a fitting room is so small, the flicker index and colour rendering become decisive factors in choosing the light. With the wrong lighting your fitting room can be full of unnecessary shadows. They distort the outline of the customer's body, a low colour rendering index makes the clothes look dull, and a high flicker index strains the eyes. Fitting rooms should be lit like this:

• from above, luminaires that imitate outdoor light (outdoors light falls from above);
• on both sides of the mirror, soft light that removes unwanted hard shadows from the clothes.

Lighting fitting rooms

Fitting rooms are lit with calm, non-dramatic scenes, so the style, cut and colour of dresses and clothes come across as neutrally as possible.

To avoid these problems, buy quality shop lighting and work with professionals who will calculate the illuminance for you.

Another fitting room trick is the mirror. It should be made of crystal-clear glass, otherwise the reflection will distort colours. Mirrors that give the skin a slight tan in the reflection are also used. Experienced retailers know that tilting the top of the mirror slightly makes a person look slimmer and their legs longer.

We live in a digital age, so decor in changing rooms deserves special attention. In spacious, bright and original fitting rooms people often take photos in the shop's clothes to compare them with other outfits later. These photos often end up on social media, which is good advertising for your shop.

Here are a few photos taken by journalist Amanda Platell that show how lighting can affect the mirror reflection in fitting rooms:

If you buy retail lighting for your shop from Vision Lighting, our specialists will prepare a lighting design for you so your goods look their best.