LightFair 2022 is ConnectFair

Last week almost 10,000 people from the electrical and lighting industry descended on Las Vegas to attend LightFair, which was held 8 months after the industry last convened to see lighting products in New York.

This show had a different feel than New York, let alone, obviously, the pre-pandemic version in Philadelphia. In fact, after this one, many wonder what future LightFair’s will be like.

Takeaways

Some observations:

• After a mask-mandated New York LightFair, almost no one wore a mask in Las Vegas, hence people were happy to “see” each other and connect.
• While LightFair consists of educational sessions and the tradeshow, most attend for the show. Those attending the seminars are typically specification personnel seeking CEU’s. According to some who attended a few of them, some sessions had a couple of hundred attendees, others had few.
• While LightFair states that there were more booths than New York, it didn’t seem like it as the show was spread out on the floor. Wide aisles. If you wanted, you could walk the entire floor within a half-day at a leisurely pace.
• But the good thing is with a reduced audience, “wandering” booths enabled attendees to enter booths and spend time speaking with manufacturers rather than quick “meet and greets.”
• The overwhelming theme was wireless connected lighting systems that can be controlled on a phone (so “contractors can commission easily” and everyone claimed their BlueTooth mesh system was the best. You could call this year “ConnectFair”.
  • As an aside, it will be interesting to observe the adoption of these connected products. Much time and money has been invested into the various product developments. Will comparable be put into training, marketing and sales efforts to drive adoption? Will contractors and end-users gravitate to the solutions? There are some new business models and revenue sources that could be developed by reps / lighting agents, distributors and/or contractors to support this initiative. It will also be interesting to see which companies (technologies) rise to the top and succeed … because they all cannot.
• There were also many architectural lighting companies, and all are not spec lines. Plenty of them had “packages / stock” material that could be used. Distributors who seek to “sell” lighting rather than value-engineer and quote / accept orders could get exposed to these lines, identify key vertical applications and could proactively recommend some of them … and differentiate themselves. According to manufacturers, WESCO had 30 attendees and Sonepar had close to 50 as we saw them moving from “booth to booth” with scheduled meetings with a number of key manufacturers. Other distributors were also in attendance as were a number of reps.
• A number of name manufacturers were not in attendance, at least at LightFair, however, most, if not all, were in Las Vegas either entertaining and/or having product displays off-site at hotels. Some had no issue visiting these companies; some commented about spending much on Uber to go back and forth and a few refused to meet with companies off-property. It will be interesting to see what happens in New York. Many commented that a driver of this phenom was cost of a booth (some claiming to have saved $250-500K), competing for traffic, displaying products for third-tier lighting companies to see and then knock-off and more.
• We didn’t see many low tier white good suppliers on the show floor nor many Asian suppliers who have no presence. Perhaps a benefit of COVID?
  • Speaking of COVID, Edison Report is reporting that at least 120 people came down with COVID. Realistically probably more as others were probably not reported. Not unexpected with such a large group.
• There were some Asian contract manufacturers wandering the show soliciting business.

Products Seen at LightFair

Our sister publication, US Lighting Trends, highlighted some products pre-conference as well as shared some highlights. Linda also met with manufacturers and will have future articles highlighting some product trends and companies. And here’s an article on LightFair’s Innovation awards.

US Lighting Trends was a LightFair media sponsor in our first year

Some companies I visited that distributors should check out include:

• Tivoli
• PureEdge
• StarTek Lighting which is a “neat” architectural lighting company with Made in USA products
• Rab had a very interesting exhibit (make sure you ask your Rab salesperson about it) and talked about its sustainability initiatives.
• Ask LedVance about their new Taptronic product and their connected “Link” offering.
• Light Efficient Design shared new HID form factor, their solar offering and BreezeEV (and a few other companies showcased EV chargers.)
• Current shared their new brand and new HLI and GLI products
• TCP had much activity in their booth and a wide array of new products … ranging from architectural to white goods, from unique lamps to the standards.
• NSL Lighting

There were others, and here are some photos, but not being a product maven …. I leave it to the reps / lighting agents to promote their suppliers’ products

If you are a manufacturer and exhibited, on www.uslightingtrends.com we’re offering to promote key products for a while. Send a graphic and 100 words describing your product and the top 3 applications / vertical markets for it, and we’ll promote your product to our 25,000+ readers.

Conclusion

It was one of those shows where you’d say, “it was a good show if you achieved your objectives.” The key with LightFair appears to be having a plan as there is a variety of audiences attending and exhibitors seem to be challenged in knowing whom to target their booth too … and this makes pre-show marketing to drive booth traffic difficult. Is the target audience specifiers? Distributors? Reps for meetings or who are seeking to recruit new lines? I even saw some contractors who were in attendance.

Unfortunately, Las Vegas isn’t the draw that LightFair probably hoped. Many people left on Wednesday late day to head back east. If the day pattern of the hotel was different, maybe people would stay for the weekend to experience the city / shows. LightFair is returning repeatedly to Vegas and, while this may help serve the West Coast, many expressed interest in the show being in other locations, especially if it is not going to return to the 25,000 attendance days. Many manufacturers commented that LEDucation generated a better bang for their buck and wonder about next year when LEDucation and LightFair are only a few weeks apart … in New York.

If you attended, what were your observations / takeaways?