Jets Swimwear: a bare retail shell, lit to sell

Working for a head contractor at the other end of the country

A national retail brand refurbishing a regional store generally brings its own designer and its own builder, and needs a local electrician who can be relied on without being supervised. Platinum Group Design and Construct ran this one out of Melbourne.

The practical meaning of that is documentation. Decisions get made against a drawing rather than in a conversation on site, variations are written down, and the programme has to hold without a head contractor walking the job every morning. It is a different discipline from working alongside a builder you see daily, and any electrician quoting a branded fit-out should be able to point at one they have finished.

Lighting that can be changed without an electrician

The store was lit with LED throughout, for function and for ambience, and a run of it on track.

Track lighting is the part of this job still doing work years later. Retail merchandising moves. What is a feature wall this season is the fitting room queue the next, and a store that can re-aim its own lights does not have to book a trade every time the layout changes. Specifying it at fit-out costs marginally more than fixed downlights and buys years of flexibility for whoever is managing the shop.

What the electrical scope covered

• LED lighting throughout, including track lighting for future re-aiming
• Power supply through the tenancy
• Data cabling and audio visual installation
• Point of sale equipment
• Door counter
• Digital wall mounted displays

What a branded fit-out actually needs from a local electrician

Retail shells in Port Douglas are mostly older tenancies, and what is behind the plasterboard rarely matches the drawing a national designer has worked from. The supply is often shared, the existing distribution board is somebody else's idea from twenty years ago, and the landlord has views about what may be fixed to what.

None of that appears on a shopfitting programme, and all of it lands on the electrician in week one. The useful thing a local contractor brings to an interstate fit-out is not cheaper labour. It is already knowing which building this is, who the landlord uses, and how long the network takes to answer the phone.

Jets opened on time. That is the whole measure of a retail fit-out, because a shop that opens a fortnight late has lost a fortnight of a season that does not come back.