August 11, 2022
3 Lighting Agents Combine Line Cards, Form Multi-State Partnership
New alliance brings Current & Lutron under one umbrella in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska & Iowa
GREAT PLAINS, UNITED STATES — Three Midwestern U.S. lighting agents are joining forces to provide multi-state lighting coverage to the Nebraska and Iowa marketplaces.
Convergence Partners, which already represents numerous lighting and electrical brands across Kansas and Missouri, has formed a partnership with Lighting Solutions of Iowa and Integrated Sales to expand its lighting and controls representation into Iowa and Nebraska (plus a little slice of Illinois in the Quad Cities area.)
The new partnership will be marketed under the Convergence Partners brands.
Current™, Lutron and Cree Lighting impact
Prior to the partnership, Integrated Sales represented numerous lines in Nebraska & Iowa including Cree Lighting and Lutron. The line card for Lighting Solutions of Iowa was headlined by the brands formerly known as Hubbell Lighting and now known as Current’s HLI Brands. Convergence did not have lighting representation in Nebraska and Iowa, but they did represent some AV & shading lines there.
The Current HLI brands had recently been a free agent in Nebraska as the former agent, Lighting Specialists recently became part of Convergence rival, Mercer Zimmerman. Today Current announced that the new Convergence Partnership will represent Current HLI in Nebraska. The new Convergence will now see unified coverage for Current’s HLI, GLI and Forum lighting brands as well as Lutron across all four states.
As a result of these developments, Integrated Sales' representation of Cree Lighting is reportedly ending, which will likely cause Cree Lighting to pursue new agent partners across the two states.
Making sense of the changes
In all, the new Convergence line cards now display 164 lines in Iowa and 81 brands in Nebraska. Recent line cards showed that Lighting Solutions of Iowa had 120 lines in Iowa and Integrated Sales had 61 in Nebraska.
The Integrated Sales website now forwards to the Convergence website. At press time, the Lighting Solutions of Iowa website no longer displays any content and may be experiencing a server error in a possible attempt to also forward visitors to the Convergence website.
Based on the wording of a Current press release, the business nature of the new three-agent alliance is not clear as the use of the word “partnership” was used without mention of merger, acquisition or assets. Our messages to principals of all three agencies since Tuesday have not been returned.
inside.lighting will soon update its Nebraska and Iowa Local Markets pages to reflect these recent changes.
TRENDING: Multiple territories turning into one territory?
Over the last 18 months, both Mercer Zimmerman and Convergence have each amassed an expanded, large presence across Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa. This may be another part of the country were multiple neighboring territories slowly merge to become one.
Over the last decade, numerous lighting agent expansions have caused once-separate lighting markets to morph into new, expanded, larger markets for certain large agents. Examples include:
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New England – which used to be three separate territories for most lighting companies.
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North Jersey – which has had the two largest Philadelphia agents move in in recent years.
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Other examples include Cleveland-Columbus, Tampa-Orlando and Minnesota-Wisconsin.
