The Evolution of Retail Experience: Insights from Professor Laura Ugolini – Part One

The pressures facing retail today – new technologies, changing customer habits, shifting expectations around experience and convenience – are not entirely new. Retail has always evolved in response to social, cultural and technological change. Long before the arrival of online shopping, retailers were experimenting with how architecture, display, atmosphere and service could influence behaviour.

We spoke with Professor Laura Ugolini, Director of the University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD), to chart this history of retail stores and the role of lighting with in it. 

The Theatre of the Early Shopfront

The instinct to attract attention is far older than the modern high street. Retailers in medieval markets and Georgian streets already understood the importance of presentation, spectacle and visibility. Yet the nineteenth century transformed what shops could physically become. Advances in manufacturing made large plate-glass windows more affordable and widely available, allowing retailers to create bigger and more ambitious displays. According to Laura, Victorian window displays often appear cluttered to modern eyes, with goods “almost crammed into the shop to give an impression of abundance.”

When Lighting Became Part of Modern Retail

Lighting has long shaped the retail experience, even before electricity became widespread. Gas lighting illuminated nineteenth-century shopfronts and allowed stores to extend trading hours, particularly in winter. Yet the interwar period marked a significant shift in how lighting was discussed and marketed.

“Modernity was very much associated with lighting. The cinemas, dance halls, and the city centre were all portrayed as being very bright in that period.”

Electric lighting became a visible symbol of progress. Retailers used brightness to communicate cleanliness, efficiency and fashionability. Stores that embraced electric lighting presented themselves as contemporary businesses aligned with changing tastes and lifestyles.

“There seems to be this association with being modern, with being up to date. They make comparisons with dark and dingy interiors.”

Trade publications of the interwar period increasingly discussed lighting as part of the wider modernisation of retail interiors, alongside shop fittings, display design and window presentation. One interwar menswear article argued that “the modern man’s shop must be bright”, contrasting contemporary retail environments with the “gloomy” and poorly organised outfitter shops of earlier decades. At Walter Scott’s menswear premises in Regent Street, “dust proof fixtures and tubular lighting” were promoted as signs of a modern retail design.

While display had long been key to retail, interwar department stores increasingly integrated it throughout the entire shopping environment. One article describing the Simpson store in Piccadilly states that space was devoted to “selling through display”, with furniture, fittings and lighting all contributing to the overall customer experience. Even then, retailers balanced aesthetics with practicality. Electricity remained relatively expensive during the interwar years, meaning natural light still played an important role. Skylights, large windows and glazed façades were often combined with electric lighting to reduce costs while maintaining bright interiors.

Markets, Spectacle and Entertainment

While department stores projected refinement and sophistication, Britain’s markets developed their own highly theatrical retail culture. Laura points to photographs of 1930s markets, where traders used electric lighting to illuminate stalls and attract crowds. The Saturday night market became both a commercial and social event.

“It was often a spectacle as well as just somewhere you went to buy your items. People went for entertainment as well as just to buy things.”

The Bolton Worktown photograph, shown below, of a brightly lit shoe stall captures this atmosphere particularly well. Electric lamps flood the stall with light while customers gather closely around the display, demonstrating how illumination could help to create drama, visibility and energy within crowded public spaces.

These markets reveal an important point about retail history: experiential retail is not a recent invention. Long before contemporary flagship stores and immersive brand environments, retailers were already using atmosphere, performance and sensory appeal to attract visitors.

Shoe Stall, 1937. Humphrey Spender. © Bolton Museum

The Department Store Revolution

If markets brought energy and spectacle, department stores introduced a new kind of controlled retail environment. By the late nineteenth century, stores such as Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis allowed customers to browse freely without the pressure to purchase immediately. Cafeterias, reading rooms, hairdressers and rest facilities encouraged visitors to spend extended periods inside.

“I would suggest that that kind of experience of actually just browsing, shopping, wandering around and just looking is probably something we associate with department stores in the nineteenth century,” 

This represented a major cultural shift. Earlier forms of shopping were often highly transactional, involving direct interaction between customer and shopkeeper. Department stores softened this exchange and made browsing itself a leisure activity. The development of customer amenities also changed who retail spaces were designed for. Many department stores actively targeted female shoppers, presenting themselves as respectable and relatively safe urban environments.

“Department stores often marketed themselves as a shop aimed specifically at female customers. Somewhere where women could actually wander around in relative safety.”

The design of these interiors reinforced that sense of reassurance and comfort. Bright, ordered environments, visible circulation routes and carefully controlled displays all contributed to a more welcoming retail experience.

Standardisation and Aspiration

As the twentieth century progressed, chain retailers began refining another retail strategy: consistency. Brands such as Marks & Spencer created standardised interiors and displays across multiple locations, helping customers recognise the brand experience wherever they shopped.

Laura points to menswear chains, such as Burton, that used fittings and fixtures designed to resemble bespoke tailoring establishments, despite selling mass-produced suits at accessible prices.

“It actually felt as if you were entering a bespoke tailor,”

This blending of aspiration and accessibility became central to twentieth-century retailing. The environment itself communicated value, trust and identity. An article on Elliotts of Reading described a modernised shopfront as possessing “quiet but compelling attraction”, suggesting retailers increasingly understood that atmosphere and identity could influence customer perception before any interaction took place.

That connection between atmosphere and perception continues today. Whether through lighting, materials, layout or display, retail environments still shape how customers interpret brands long before a purchase is made.

The Foundations of Modern Retail

By the interwar period, retailers were already thinking carefully about how lighting, display, materials and layout influenced perception and behaviour. Many of the themes shaping retail design today – atmosphere, identity, experience and customer comfort – were already emerging nearly a century ago.

In part two, we will look at how retail continued to evolve through the twentieth century – from department stores and chain stores to self-service, convenience shopping, and the modern question of what physical stores can offer that digital retail cannot