How Installing A Shade Structure Can Improve Your Business
As the summer heat intensifies yearly, posing risks to health and hampering commerce, more Australian businesses consider incorporating shade structures. Realising outdoor shade solutions include far more than beach umbrellas solely benefiting beachgoers.
Smart business owners install custom architectural shade elements tailored to their spaces to boost safety, capabilities and experiences year-round.
Whether to shelter customers, host events or protect inventory displays from fading, companies who embrace shade systems enjoy competitive edges while demonstrating corporate social responsibility prioritising wellbeing.
Here are 9 ways that installing a shade structure can improve your business.
1. Protect Customers and Employees from the Sun
Providing shade allows people to take refuge from the harsh rays of the sun. This protects them against sunburn, skin damage, eye strain headaches, heat exhaustion and associated health risks that arise from overexposure to harmful UV rays.
Ensuring safety and comfort should be a priority that you take seriously as a community-minded business owner.
2. Make Outdoor Areas More Usable
Shade enables businesses to utilize outdoor spaces more often because customers and staff can remain outside longer without overheating when shade structures are in place.
Expand product displays, seating, dining settings and employee work areas under protective shade structures. Even a small covered patio or pergola goes far, extending usable areas all year round.
Where shade structures make a difference is for sports courts and other recreational areas.
Many sporting events are canceled due to intense sun or rain, and a shade structure can prevent the weather from getting in the way of games and competitions.
Popular with bowling clubs across the country, look at these lawn bowl shelters from Greenline and picture how your bowling greens could be used all year round, rain, hail or shine.
3. Reduce Air Conditioning Costs
With shade buffering sunlight and heat, your business can significantly reduce air conditioner usage and save on costly electric bills over months. Even partial shade structures helping to simply keep intense afternoon sun at bay make a substantial difference in energy consumption.
Every little reduction helps margins and makes a bigger dent than you'd think in those ongoing expenses.
4. Boost Ambiance & Aesthetic Appearance
From striking sail shades adding architectural focal points to bold and artistic tensile membrane fabric structures, shade solutions boost visual curb appeal and create more inviting relaxed atmospheres on properties for patrons to enjoy.
Custom signage or lighting incorporated into the frameworks can spotlight your brand too, making for a convenient marketing opportunity.
5. Provide Additional Outdoor Seating Space
Shade structures can cost-effectively expand the seating capacity at your business by enabling additional tables and chairs to be situated outside.
More customers will tolerate dining alfresco comfortably without the summer sun beating down on them.
This allows establishments to accommodate higher volumes and maximise sales potential, acting as a strategic investment.
6. Host Outdoor Events
Venues able to offer shade through canvas tents, market umbrellas or park pavilions provide cover for markets, concerts, weddings, fundraisers and other events drawing crowds who’ll appreciate respite from the baking sun.
Shade structures transform spaces into usable seasonal event-hosting venues.
7. Deliver Positive Brand Impressions
Visitors perceive establishments providing shade and sunblock as caring greatly about their well-being.
This provides an opportunity to create customer loyalty and positive word of mouth as people remember the business going the extra mile to ensure positive experiences despite intense sun or rain that could have spoiled their memory otherwise if no precautions existed.
Such care makes lasting impressions that extend well beyond a fleeting refuge from the elements for customers.
8. Increase Staff Productivity & Performance
Employees working under shade structures stay cooler, hydrated and less stressed by UV exposure when running business operations outdoors.
Minimising glare and skin damage risk keeps personnel focused, upbeat and better able to deliver excellent customer service without exhaustion or irritation that accompanies overheating under the sun.
This also prevents OH&S issues that can arise from heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
9. Protect Products from Sun Damage
Unless blocked by suitable blackout shades, UV rays can damage interiors, fade and deteriorate physical merchandise quickly when displayed unprotected outdoors. Fabrics, paints and finishes require coverage.
Area shade structures safeguard displayed inventory from preventable damage that would otherwise accelerate wear and tear significantly if left continuously exposed to harsh sunlight and heat without any buffer.
Final Thoughts
Installing creative shade solutions tailored to specific business spaces and purposes generates countless benefits, from health protections to increased capacities and positive experiences that drive sales and loyalty over time.
Whether standalone or attached structures with custom flourishes added to improve branding and atmospheres, shade investments offer strong ROI for nearly any establishment interacting with people outdoors.
Smart strategies futureproof business operations against intensifying climate challenges too! Transform your business landscape with a shade structure and see the benefits unfolding before you, you won’t regret it.
Jenny Kakoudakis likes to blog about interiors. She launched the award-winning Seasons in Colour in 2014. When she is not chasing criminals out of the financial system (her day job), she gets creative by redecorating her own home.
Download her free bathroom renovation guide here.
