June 22, 2026
LDI and Leesman Lighting Join Forces In Cincinnati
Current and Lutron now share a statewide platform across all Ohio markets
Thirty years ago, Lighting Dynamics was a Northeast Ohio agency with two principals in their mid-twenties and a line card anchored by what was then Hubbell Lighting, before Columbia Lighting, Prescolite, and Kim Lighting joined the portfolio. The brands grew. The agency grew with them. Today, LDI Ohio covers the entire state.
The latest chapter came on Friday, when LDI Ohio and Leesman Lighting announced they had joined forces, creating a single organization serving all of Ohio. The press release called it a partnership. In Cincinnati, where Leesman has spent decades building one of the stronger Current Lighting territories, the announcement completes something LDI has been building toward since it first crossed into Columbus city limits.
A Footprint Built One Market at a Time
Rick Coberly founded LDI in 1996 with a partner and a Cleveland-Akron territory. The expansion since then has followed a deliberate pattern: Columbus, then Toledo, then the Lutron consolidation earlier this year that handed LDI statewide controls coverage in one move. Cincinnati was the last Ohio gap, and the longest-standing one.
Leesman, a 75-year old agency that also forged a Hubbell relationship in 1996, built its Cincinnati franchise carefully. The agency is widely regarded as the market's number two lighting agency, trailing only King Lighting, which has led the Cincinnati-Dayton corridor since long before the Current name existed. That is not a slight. In a market King has controlled since before many of the current generation of lighting reps got their first business cards, running second takes real work.
Cooper Lighting, by contrast, has cycled through six representatives in Cincinnati over the past seventeen years. Ever since King moved to Acuity, Cooper has been looking up at Leesman in market share, a run that reflects how difficult it is to recover meaningful ground once the territory's strongest rep is no longer in your corner. Lighting and Controls, the Cleveland-based agency, picked up Columbus and Cincinnati for Cooper in 2025, giving it three of the four Ohio lighting markets, but the ground Leesman built over three decades was never really in play.
With Leesman now folded into LDI's organization, the state footprint is complete.
The Lutron Wrinkle, Now Resolved
The timing matters more than the geography. Earlier this year, Lutron consolidated its Ohio coverage under LDI, replacing Riffle Associates in Cincinnati after a 20-plus year run. That move left LDI in an unusual position: statewide Lutron coverage, but no Current relationship in Cincinnati. Walking into a specifier's office with one half of a pitch is a workable situation. It is not a comfortable one.
In a market like Cincinnati, where companies such as Heapy Engineering and Kendall Electric operate across multiple Ohio cities, the gap was visible. In Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo, LDI arrives with Current and Lutron. In Cincinnati, until now, the controls story was there. The luminaire story was not.
That asymmetry has been corrected.
Ohio's Map Has Been Redrawing Itself
The LDI-Leesman development is the most consequential move in a sequence that has been reshaping Ohio's lighting representation landscape for the better part of three years.
Genlyte Solutions, marketed under a multi-state partnership with LightSpec, has operated statewide under a single agency. Current Lighting had already unified its Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo representation under LDI before this week's announcement completed the picture. And in perhaps the most telling signal of the trend's momentum, Acuity, long the industry's most visible holdout against agency consolidation, approved the merger of Lighting Systems of Columbus and Jack Duffy and Associates into DLS Group, effective January 1st of this year, creating a unified presence along the Interstate 75 corridor from Columbus to Cleveland.
Statewide coverage is hardly a foreign concept in Ohio. Electrical reps with lighting and controls mixed into their line cards, among them Riffle Associates and Hawkins Sales, have operated across the state for decades. LDI is now the second lighting-focused agency to reach that same footprint.
The Logic Is Getting Harder to Argue With
The business case for statewide agency coverage has not changed dramatically. What has changed is how visible the case has become.
Architects, engineers, contractors, and distributors rarely confine themselves to a single Ohio market. A firm specifying a hospital campus in Columbus may be making decisions that touch Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo simultaneously. When the agency structure does not match the customer's footprint, the friction shows up in specification coordination, submittal delays, and account management gaps that are difficult to paper over.
For manufacturers, a single contract, a single leadership conversation, and a single point of accountability across a major state represents a meaningful operational simplification. That calculation has been reshaping the map in Michigan, in New England, and now, with some recent urgency, in Ohio.
Whether the state ultimately settles into a small number of fully statewide agencies remains an open question. But with LDI and Lightspec now covering all four corners of Ohio and DLS Group anchoring the Columbus-Cleveland corridor, the Ohio that lighting people navigated five years ago looks like a different industry than the one taking shape today.
