Lighting trade shows provide that critical interface between manufacturers and designers that make possible the exchange of new product and technical information, and provide important networking opportunities. Over time, the lighting industry has developed various formats for these events, everything from week-long international expos to one-day local lighting representative showcases for a particular suite of brands.
In the early 1990s, there were two major national lighting trade shows trying to find their feet in the United States: Lighting World and Lightfair. The schedule in 1990—Lightfair in April in New York and two iterations of Lighting World, one in June in Chicago and one in October in Los Angeles —put a great deal of stress on the industry, as architectural lighting’s editor at the time, Wanda Jankowski, noted in “Trade Show Trauma” (August 1990). She quoted lighting manufacturer Marvin Gelman, founder of Stony Point, N.Y.–based Lighting Services Inc: “The coasts have become prohibitive for manufacturers to participate in more than one trade show a year.” Today, the issues of time and expense are still a critical factor, as exhibitors and attendees decide which trade shows are necessary to attend in order to deliver and to keep up with the latest product introductions.
Lightfair wound up being the victor of the North American market and, over the course of its 27-year history, has become the go-to event for lighting designers in the United States. All of which is not surprising when you realize that the show is co-owned by the International Association of Lighting Designers, the Illuminating Engineering Society, and AMC, the company that also produces and manages the event.
In the early days of Lightfair, the show rotated between New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. In 2003, the coast-to-coast rotation was limited to New York and Las Vegas. In 2011, because of the renovation at the Javitz Center in New York, Lightfair moved to Philadelphia. Last year, it was held in San Diego, where it drew 617 exhibitors and 27,628 registered attendees, a far cry from that first New York show which had 208 exhibitors and 7,500 registered attendees.
Outside of the U.S., Messe Frankfurt oversees a series of megascale trade shows around the world. For the lighting design community, the most notable is the biannual Light+Building. Held at the company’s fairground in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the complex includes 12 exhibition halls and a congress center and covers 6.2 million square feet. In 2016, Messe Frankfurt reported that the fair had received 216,000 trade visitors from 160 countries, and 2,589 exhibitors. Over the past decade, the international spectacle has drawn an even larger contingency of lighting designers and manufacturers from the United States, and that has started to impact how manufacturers choose to exhibit here.
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