How LED neon lighting can increase your foot traffic and sales

If you walk down any busy high street and pay attention to which shops you actually notice. It's not the ones with the most stock in the window or with cleanest windows. The ones your eyes land on.

They're almost always the well-lit ones.

It's not a coincidence. And it's not just taste. There's a body of research behind it, a clear pattern of behaviour among the UK's biggest retailers, and a very practical point about what small businesses can do about it without spending a fortune.

The German study that changed how retailers think about lighting

A retail study carried out in Germany tracked stores over 21 weeks and measured what happened when they switched to LED lighting. Foot traffic went up by 15% and sales increased by 6%. No new products, no promotions and  there was no rebrand. Just better lighting.

Think what a 15% increase in footfall means for your business,

For most independents shops, that's the difference between a quiet week and a busy one, repeated week after week. The reason it works is pretty simple, humans are drawn to brightness. It signals warmth, activity, safety. A well-lit space reads as alive. A dim or flat one reads as closed-off, or just uninteresting. That judgement happens in a fraction of a second, long before anyone has consciously decided whether to go in.

The University of Cincinnati found that effective illuminated signage can increase sales by 7 to 15 percent on its own. The International Sign Association put the foot traffic number at up to 20% more for businesses with illuminated signs versus those without. A FedEx Office report found that 76% of consumers had walked into a business they'd never visited before based entirely on the signage.

Three separate data points. All pointing the same direction.

What M&S and the supermarkets already know

Marks and Spencer opened what they called their most sustainable Simply Food store in Sheffield, fitted throughout with Philips LED technology across the shop floor, back of house, and car park. Lighting costs dropped 25 to 30 percent compared to conventional stores. The store manager described the result as a fresh, modern shopping environment. M&S used it as the blueprint for what followed, and what followed was significant: a £90 million store renewal programme across London alone, with LED lighting listed as a core strand of the investment alongside extended ranges and new flooring.

These are not aesthetic decisions. M&S runs on detailed customer behaviour data and they keep coming back to light.

Walk into a Tesco, a Waitrose, or a Sainsbury's and look at what's happening above the bakery counter, the produce section, the deli. Bright LEDs. Illuminated signage. Warm light on fresh food. That's the output of years of retail science all telling the same story: light keeps people in the store longer, and people who stay longer buy more.

This isn't always an option for small businesses

A full interior lighting overhaul is not a realistic option for most small businesses Fitting out a shop floor with new lights, electrics and smart sensors takes serious cash and closing down for a few days.

But here's the thing, you don't really need any of that to benefit from the same principle.

What the research tells us is that light draws people in as it creates warmth, curiosity, the sense that something is happening. For a small business, a neon sign in your window does that job from the outside. Visible all day and even more visible at night. Visible from across the street. It's the small business version of what M&S is spending millions on, applied at a fraction of the cost.

What actually happens when the sign goes in

We've made neon signs for businesses across the UK since 2021, covering everything from independent cafes and barber shops to tattoo studios, salons, gyms, and bars from London cocktail bars to Yorkshire locals. The feedback we hear most often isn't about the sign itself. It's the customers who mention, unprompted, that they'd walked past a dozen times and never gone in, then came in the day the sign went up.

That's not coincidence. It's the same effect the research describes, playing out at street level.

There's a secondary effect that builds up quietly over time. A well-designed sign becomes a backdrop people photograph without being asked. They post it, tag the location, show it to people who've never heard of the business. That kind of reach is something large brands spend serious money trying to manufacture. A good sign generates it for free, repeatedly, without any further effort on your part.

Then there's the night shift. When footfall drops and the high street quietens, a lit sign keeps you visible long after the competition has gone dark. For anywhere doing evening trade, that matters more than most owners realise until they've got one.

Getting it right

This doesn't mean to start hanging signs bought for £10 on temu all over your walls. Cheap signs with the wrong size in the wrong position which doesn't match your brand can send the wrong message. We cover sizing in detail in our guide on how to choose the right size neon sign for your space. A sign that's too small gets lost, a sign that dominates the window blocks natural light. The sweet spot is something that pulls attention without filling the frame.

Anything more than four or five words starts to lose impact from pavement distance. A business name, a short phrase, one clear idea.

Colour is always important and should be on brand. Warm whites and ambers read as welcoming and premium. Brighter pinks and blues feel energetic and modern. Neither is wrong. It depends on who your customers are and what you want someone to feel about your space before they're even close enough to read the sign.

Don't settle for less

The LED neon sign market expanded fast and a lot of what you'll find online looks fine in a product photo and arrives looking nothing like it. Signs that fade after a few months. Signs that flicker. Signs where the colour doesn't match what was shown on screen. A sign in your window is a direct representation of your business. It's what people see before they decide whether you're worth going into. It needs to look right and hold up.

Neon Daddy is the highest rated LED neon sign manufacturer in the UK on Trustpilot. Every sign is built by hand in our Wokingham workshop, individually tested before it leaves us, and backed by a three-year warranty. We're Made in Britain accredited. We've made signs for Amazon, Gymshark, Dyson, and JD Sports. We've also made signs for the independent cafe on a side street in Leeds, the barber in Bristol who'd been meaning to do something about his frontage for two years, the tattoo studio in Edinburgh that became the most photographed spot on the block within a week of the sign going in.

Same quality. Same process. Same warranty. Whether you're a chain or a one-person operation.