Copywriting

How to write
lighting descriptions.

A structure for lamps: the room first, the object second, the specs as answers.

7 min read Updated 23 September 2026

Most lamp descriptions are inventory records with adjectives glued on. Elegant arched floor lamp with marble base and linen shade. Brings a touch of sophistication to any space. That sentence is on nine thousand product pages and has never sold anything, because it describes the object — and nobody is buying the object.

Start with the room, not the lamp

The customer is imagining an evening. Write the evening.

Reads as one warm pool over the armchair. The rest of the room stays dark, which is the point.

That is a sentence about a room, and it can be pictured. Compare elegant arched design provides ambient illumination: a sentence about a category, and nobody has ever pictured a category.

The first sentence does one job

It says what this lamp is for, and by implication what it is not for. Being plain about what a product does not do is not a weakness — it is the thing that makes everything after it believable.

• A reading lamp you can actually read by.
• Too dim to work under. That is deliberate.
• Lights the ceiling, not the table. Use it with something else.

Any one of those beats twenty words of sophisticated ambient illumination.

Three details, not thirty

After the room, pick three concrete things and stop. The ones that earn their place are the ones a photograph cannot say:

• How the material behaves once it is lit — the linen goes grainy and warm from the inside.
• Something about the making that implies care — the brass is unlacquered, so it will darken where you touch it.
• One honest limitation — the switch is on the cord, not the base.

Thirty features read as a list of thirty features. Three specific ones read as somebody who has held the thing.

Write the specifications as answers

Every spec line is a question somebody was about to ask. Write the answer, not the abbreviation:

• Not E27 but E27 — the standard screw fitting, bulbs anywhere.
• Not 2700 K but 2700 K — warm, the colour of an old bulb.
• Not H 180 cm but 180 cm — the shade sits above a seated head.
• Not 2 m cable but 2 m of cable — reaches a socket across a rug.

Same data, several fewer support emails, and it reads like a shop instead of a database export.

What to cut

• Adjectives any lamp could claim. Elegant, stunning, versatile, stylish. If it fits every product in your catalogue, it is not describing this one.
• Any space. Perfect for any space means you have not thought about which space.
• The paragraph about your brand values. Not on the product page.
• Repeating the title. They read it already.

The paragraph you cannot write

At some point the description runs out. You can write it throws a soft pattern on the wall behind it and the reader will nod — but they will not see it, and the seeing is the thing being bought. That is the ceiling on copy for a lighting page, and it is why a beautifully written lamp description still loses to a mediocre one with a photograph of the lamp lit.

Write the room, cut the adjectives, answer the specs as questions. Then accept that the last stretch is a photography problem and not a writing one.