Visual Merchandising and Store Design | VMSD.com

Seeing the Light: Swarovski's display case lighting was gobbling up so much energy, it was confronting state energy regulation limits.

By Steve Kaufman

If Swarovski crystals don’t sparkle, you might as well be selling potatoes in those display cases.

“We need to be able to stop shoppers in their tracks,” says Morgan McSweeney, senior manager of store planning and construction for Swarovski North American Ltd. (Cranston, R.I.).

The 115-year-old Austrian company has been using fiberoptic cables in the display cases of its North American stores, with 150-watt metal halides as the light source. “It’s a good, high-quality light,” says McSweeney. “And because the fibers we use are glass instead of plastic, the light doesn’t denigrate or turn yellow.”

But the operating costs of metal halides are high. And they gobble up a lot of energy, which was pushing the retailer to the limit of the energy codes in more and more states. “We were just getting killed,” says McSweeney. “We were using up our allotted energy just in the cases, in highly regulated states like California and New York. It left us practically no room for ceiling lighting.”

The metal halides also required a lot of money and effort to maintain. Display cases had to remain cool and dust-free or the lamps would overheat and burn out sooner than they should (which is roughly two years for an illuminator and one year for a lamp). And while fans and screens had been installed in the cases to minimize the heat and dust, McSweeney notes that the cases were always being opened by the sales associates, so heat and dust were accumulating anyway.

When a lamp burned out, it cost $100 per lamp to replace, a hefty price tag for the company’s 25 to 30 display cases per store. “Or,” says McSweeney, citing the age-old store planner’s complaint, “the sales associates would simply leave them dark.”

LED lighting promised to solve some of the problems – particularly heat and durability – but, says McSweeney, “LEDs had not traditionally produced the clear, sparkling white light that we needed.”

Then Swarovski’s long-time fiberoptic lighting supplier, Schott North America (Elmsford, N.Y.), developed a new lighting system that took direct aim at Swarovski’s display case problems, using an LED light source instead of metal halide.

“The Schott LED High-Brightness Lightsource system that we installed produces the same amount of light as the previous 150-watt metal halides,” says Robert Hughes, sales manager for Schott Architectural Lighting (Southbridge, Mass.), “but at less than 100 watts – or roughly a 40 percent savings in energy-consumption.”

Replacements were required less frequently, too. The LEDs have a life expectancy of 50,000 hours to the metal halides’ 6000 hours. And because the LEDs generate less heat than metal halide, they become less of a burden on the stores’ HVAC systems.

The trade-off, of course, is the up-front costs. LEDs are typically twice the price of metal halide. Considering the number of display cases throughout Swarovski’s chain of a thousand stores and shops throughout North America, McSweeney had a big challenge convincing management that the investment was worth it.

“I made the case that one LED Lightsource system would last 50,000 hours, meaning it would not need to be changed for nine years, even if it ran 15 hours a day, 365 days a year,” he says. “Also, it would give us the flexibility to operate comfortably under even the most rigid state energy code.”

What’s more, the current generation of LEDs produces a 4400k color temperature, ideal for displaying the array of Swarovski products, both warmer gold tones and cool colors such as silver. The LED’s CRi (color rendering index) is a solid 90, helping make sure the crystals’ various colors remain true. And the bright, wide viewing angles ensure each piece of Swarovski crystal is illuminated from multiple directions, causing facets of the crystal to reflect and sparkle.

Though LEDs had not always produced such pure white light, the technology has been evolving, and it took Schott about a year and a half to perfect it for its fiberoptics. Swarovski became the first retailer in the world to try it out.

“One evening after closing,” says Hughes, “we went into Swarovski’s 2200-square-foot Rockefeller Center store in New York and switched out the metal halides for LEDs in just one side of the store. The next day, we talked to customers as they walked through the store. People just couldn’t tell the difference.”

But, says McSweeney, the Swarovski accountants who pay the company’s lighting and air conditioning bills for its more than 1000 North American stores – they could tell the difference.