Lighting Store's New Showroom Puts Spotlight On 'Wow' Factor

Suriving 2009

Lighting store’s new showroom puts spotlight on ‘wow’ factor

by Alison Grant | PlainDealer Business 2009

Customers will stop a few paces into Marty Bursky’s home lighting store and just stare.

Conveniently, the store’s front foyer has four chairs and a coffee table that invite you to plop down as long as necessary.

“We wanted to create the ‘wow’ factor,” Bursky said about the visual pizazz that greets visitors to the rebuilt Cleveland Lighting store in Lyndhurst.

Ten months ago, the building was a smoking shell.

Bursky was jolted out of sleep on an icy Sunday morning in mid-February by a phone call telling him the Mayfield Road store was in flames.

He raced to the scene from his home a mile and a half away, only to watch helplessly as the business was gutted by fire. Out of the ashy wreck, the Bursky family resolved, would come a better-than-ever lighting store.

“Once we got over the initial shock, we decided this was an opportunity,” said Bursky, who had converted a failing lighting business he bought in 1994 into a successful shop with steady clientele.

Cleveland Lighting opened a temporary showroom three blocks west of their building, which was hollowed out like a bonbon but had little exterior damage. Then Bursky and his son Matt set off on a whirlwind tour of lighting showrooms.

Marty Bursky headed west, to retailers in Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Matt Bursky headed south, to stores in Atlanta, Savannah and Miami. Back in Ohio they spread out photos of visits to 50 showrooms.

It hit them then. It was like the Dustin Hoffman character in “The Graduate” who gets a single piece of business advice — “plastics.” The Burskys realized that the best showrooms in the United States shared a single humble component: Drywall.

Retail lighting stores everywhere have “salami shop” displays with lights dangling from 5-foot-square grids suspended from the ceiling by chains.

The array is captivating but makes for visual overload. Customers leave confused and vaguely unhappy, Marty Bursky said. They can’t figure out what they want.

In Savannah, Matt Bursky visited a showroom by industrial designer Kristen Howard, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. Instead of gobs of overhead lighting, Howard built warm, intimate vignettes that showed how lights would look in a customer’s home.

Creating the mood depended on installing full drywall ceilings at normal home heights instead of metal tracking, suspended panels and barnlike roofs. Drywall also went into the construction of staged rooms for featuring separate design styles.

Howard’s plans are more expensive to build than displays in the standard lighting store. They are less flexible since they involve fixed electrical boxes — about 2,000 of them at the Lyndhurst showroom. And the vignettes don’t hold as many lights as salami panels, so displays have to be “edited.”

But the Burskys were sold on it. They hired Howard to consult on every facet of Cleveland Lighting’s new layout, from wall paint and floor covering to the placement of outlets.

“Just spreading it out and prioritizing helps customers so much,” Howard said. “It gives breathing space. It’s just easier for you to take it all in and make better decisions.”

The designer said she’s absorbed by differences in light and described how as a college student she once wrote down every word she could think of to describe it.

“Dapple, shine, glow. It’s a huge subject, and I’ve only just stuck my toe in it,” Howard said in a phone call from her home in Durham, N.C.

Herschman Architects in Warrensville Heights, which renovated the outside of Cleveland Lighting in 2006, came on as architect and engineer for the interior remake. Retail builder K.J. Mirman Construction in Akron was general contractor.

“This is something that you don’t see in Cleveland,” project manager Brett Mirman said. “It’s something that you would see in Chicago or New York.”

The entrance of Cleveland Lighting has strategic sight lines into the store’s main design zones. A traditional room beckons with an Italian silk pendant dripping with crystals. The modern zone glints with contemporary, hard-edged fixtures and a modern-Swarovski chandelier. The popular “transitional” zone has clean, midcentury designs.

Straight ahead is the bath department, clad in white subway tile and mirrors to show the way light reflects in bathrooms. Outdoor lighting is set against brick, stucco and wood siding.

“We try to give our clients a push and say ‘Here’s how it’s going to look in your house,’ ” said Matt Bursky, who grew up in the business and is now sales manager.

As the showroom was readied for its grand opening in November, Cleveland Lighting also revamped other parts of the business. It teamed with a software company to improve inventory control. It spruced up its online lighting products catalogue. The final touch was a new logo.

Marty Bursky didn’t have revenue numbers for the renovated showroom since it opened so recently. But he said traffic has increased dramatically.

“We’ve already seen immediate positive results,” he said. “Not only in sales. Designers and architects have been flabbergasted by this.”

content and photos source: PlainDealer Business 2009