June 26, 2026
Light! Design Expo Packs the Embarcadero Again
1,600 attendees reinforced the show's reputation as the Bay Area's premier lighting event
Pier 27 at San Francisco’s Embarcadero filled up again on June 25.
Light! Design Expo drew approximately 1,600 attendees across more than 150 exhibitor booths, and the San Francisco Section of the Illuminating Engineering Society delivered another edition that held its shape from open to close.
The show moved at a pace that worked in both directions: busy enough to sustain real activity throughout the day, steady enough that booth conversations could go somewhere. Exhibitors had time to demonstrate products properly. Visitors had time to learn. That balance is harder to maintain than it looks, and the IES San Francisco Section has been maintaining it for nine years.
Light! Design Expo is a one-day event, free to attend, staged inside a glass-wrapped pier with floor-to-ceiling views of the Bay Bridge and the water beyond. The format is straightforward: exhibitor booths, accredited education sessions, food truck "booths", and a cross-section of the lighting community that is difficult to assemble any other way. For many lighting people, it has become a dependable fixture on the annual calendar.
Above: Is it the dynamic Allie Schieffelin or The Lighting Quotient's architectural products drawing the crowd at booth 134?
The Coalition That Makes It Work
The San Francisco Section of the IES produces and controls the event. What gives it its particular character, though, is the collaborative posture of the Northern California lighting agency community. Eight competing lighting agents, ALR, sixteen5hundred, CAL Lighting, Lighting Systems, Archetype, Healy Mattos, DZ Cook, and Wunder Lighting, contribute to an event where their manufacturer lines share floor space and their staffs work alongside each other for the day.
The origins of that arrangement trace back to the show's 2017 founding, when IES San Francisco board members who happened to work for competing agencies decided to build something together. That founding spirit has carried forward. On the show floor, the competitive tensions that normally define Northern California agency life, the fight for every school project, every corporate interior, every government building, go quiet for one day.
Not every lighting market could sustain this. In some markets, a dominant agency might hold its own private event rather than share floor space with rivals. That calculation is understandable. The Northern California version – and other IES section events in Detroit and Tampa — consistently deliver a different premise.
Robert Soler, BIOS Lighting Founder, unpacks what RP-46-25 means for circadian lighting design.
Who Was in the Room
The design community turned out in numbers. Brandon Thrasher of HLB Lighting Design brought his entire San Francisco office, all ten members, a presence that reflects the show's standing among specifiers. HDR sent at least four electrical engineers from its Walnut Creek office, about 25 miles from the pier. The team has been deep in data center work but noted they pursue projects that also call for more architectural solutions, which brought them to the floor.
Among the lighting design firms in attendance: PritchardPeck Lighting, JS Nolan + Associates, Auerbach Glasow, Electrolight, Hiram Banks Lighting Design and Luma Lighting Design. The IES and AIA accredited education sessions drew consistent crowds. The food trucks, a fixture since the show's early years, kept attendees on premises and in circulation. The San Francisco Giants had a 12:45 p.m. first pitch against the Oakland Athletics, the A's now playing their home games in West Sacramento, which gave some attendees the opportunity to catch a day-light doubleheader with a clean path to Pier 27 by mid-afternoon.
The reach of the event extended well beyond the Bay Area. Lighting agents made the trip from Seattle, Oregon, Arizona, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Denver, spanning both Mountain and Pacific time zones. One of the furthest traveled may have been Robert Schnell of Arctic Lighting Agency, who came down from Alaska to attend Light! Design Expo for the first time.
One Floor, For Now
There is quiet consideration of expanding the event in 2027, potentially adding a second floor at the same Pier 27 location. Linda Carrillo, who directed the event for years while working as a specification sales professional with Lighting Systems and has since moved to a role with Inter-Lux, confirmed the expansion is under consideration but said nothing has been finalized.
The conversation points to a real constraint: interest in the event, from exhibitors and attendees alike, has continued to press against what the current layout can absorb. How to grow without changing the character of a show that works precisely because of its scale is the question the IES San Francisco Section will be working through in the months ahead. For lighting people who have made Light! Design Expo a reliable stop on the annual calendar, the answer matters.
