October 7, 2025
St. Louis Carve-Out: Current Moves HLI Line to Schaeffer
Territory cut from Convergence’s multi-state footprint in rare regional exception
In a strategic reshuffling with regional reverberations, Current has appointed Schaeffer Marketing Group as its new representative for the HLI portfolio (formerly Hubbell Lighting) in eastern Missouri and southern Illinois, effective November 1, 2025. The move brings an end to Convergence’s four-year partnership in the St. Louis market, though the agency retains representation of the HLI brands across Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and western Missouri.
While agent switches are a routine part of the lighting industry’s churn, this one cuts with surgical precision: a single metro area carved out of Convergence’s multi-state footprint. Moves like this are rare — especially for Current, which in recent years has handed over expansive swaths of territory to Bell & McCoy in the South, often favoring consolidation over fragmentation.
From Convergence to Course Correction
Convergence took over the HLI line in St. Louis in January 2021, inheriting the territory from LEC & Company, a local firm with long-standing roots in the area’s lighting ecosystem. Just months later, two of LEC’s principals — Bruce Eason and Don Calcaterra — joined Schaeffer Marketing Group. That left Convergence to build a presence in a market where Schaeffer now had inherited HLI DNA, even without the line itself.
By all accounts, Convergence remains strong in its original Kansas City home base. Convergence had four years to cook up momentum for Current HLI in St. Louis, but the dish didn’t seemingly quite come out as planned. In this town, if you can’t get the toasted ravioli right, someone else will.
Post-Current, Convergence will maintain roughly 69 other lines in the region, a smaller, but still healthy roster — now missing a luminaire anchor that brought strong commercial and specification potential to its offering.
A Well-Timed Win for Schaeffer
For Schaeffer Marketing Group, the timing is no accident. The family-owned firm, led by Kristina Steiger since taking the reins from her father Mike Schaeffer (retired in 2021), has long been known for its strengths in local electrical markets — representing ABB, Prysmian/Encore Wire, and Thomas & Betts. Lighting has been part of the firm’s story, but not the headline.
That may change with the addition of HLI.
It also arrives at a moment of portfolio turbulence. Just days before the announcement, one of Schaeffer’s largest lighting lines, Cree Lighting, initiated a three-week furlough. Current’s HLI lineup gives Schaeffer a new lighting backbone — one with breadth across luminaires and controls, plus built-in legacy ties through Don Calcaterra. For an agency that lived through the ULT meltdown of 2023, Schaeffer is likely glad to have a formidable alternative to Cree Lighting at the moment.
“This will allow us to add strong talent to our great, local team,” Steiger said in a release, “to help find new opportunities for Current in the specification, stock, design-build and controls markets.”
The market will be watching to see whether this reshuffle drives deeper penetration for Current, or simply reflects an increasingly transactional dynamic between reps and manufacturers. But in a town like St. Louis, where local relationships still matter, Schaeffer’s homegrown history may prove more than symbolic — it may be strategic.
