Lighting fixtures are among the hottest technology categories right now and CE pros who have added it to their portfolios are typically beaming thanks to its impact. Miami-area Maxicon can attest to that.
The integrator had already been doing lighting controls for years, but for about the past five years has been big into lighting fixtures. It’s a category the industry buying groups embraced in recent years, and has gained prominence as tunable, color-changing and human-centric lighting also received more attention.
“Lighting fixtures in particular is one of the most exciting areas of growth” for Maxicon, says co-founder and sales manager Andres Klein.
CE Pro added the Lighting Fixtures category to our annual CE Pro 100 Brand Analysis, and this year in just the second tracking it, all companies enjoyed bigger dealer share among the brand leaders.
Right behind dominant lighting company Lutron and Ketra (the lighting fixtures company Lutron recently acquired), third among the category leaders sits DMF Lighting. The manufacturer jumped from just four CE Pro 100 dealer mentions last year to 26% this year, earning a CE Pro “Bullet Brand” distinction.
Lighting Fixtures Presents Ability to Work Better with Specifiers
DMF Lighting is a chief reason lighting fixtures have become so profitable for Maxicon.
The integrator offers a range of DMF LED fixtures solutions. The brand’s DCD Series, a Lightfair Innovation Award winner, provides a flexible field configuration system that incorporates streamlined housing and LED modules, for instance.
“About six, seven years ago, one of the architects that really trusts us asked us if were able to do a lighting design – we had shown him some RGB lighting, and he thought that was very cool for certain areas we were recommending,” Klein recalls. “He said, ‘why don’t you guys use your creativity, I know you’re not actually lighting designers but let me see a version of what you would do for lighting design.’
At the same time, Maxicon had brought on an architect to its team, and sought to enhance its positioning as an expert not only for homeowners but the specifiers who worked with them.
“You had to plan and listen to the architect and that way you can decide these are the areas I want to make sure are well illuminated, this is where the art is going to go … and we started saying, ‘OK, what products will actually work with the taste and the functionality that our specifier wanted,” Klein says.
“That’s how we got into lighting. Little by little, all the specifiers were listening to us.”
Flexibility to Create Mix of Lighting Fixtures Solutions
DMF Lighting offers OneFrame, SquareFrame, SurfaceFrame and Classic Frames options for lighting fixtures, and lighting types that include recessed downlight, surface mount, adjustable, warm dim, wall mount and cylinder & pendant form factors.
Klein says Maxicon manages to take advantage of DMF’s ability to deliver various fixtures and especially the ease of which customers and specifiers can use the housing and modules to decide what they want – and not have to rip everything out if someone changes their mind.
“We became the point of conversation of architectural lighting for every specifier we’ve been working with. DMF solutions fit into various fixtures, designs,” Klein says.
It’s enabled the company to look at lighting design with a similar approach to how it outfits a distributed audio system, and the varying environments influence the mix of solutions.
“DMF is probably one brand that’s close to what we do in audio,” Klein says. “We’re used to in architectural audio having the same preconstruction bracket and having multiple types of speakers that we can actually set up in the ceiling. And one of the things we love about DMF is that ability to have in one housing and the possibility of really playing with multiple lamps and multiple trims.
“So we can work very well at a preconstruction phase, a rough phase without making changes and if a designer wants to make a change and see what that other trim is going to look like by the time we’re ready for that.”
Klein says DMF not many companies can match DMF’s ability to facilitate interchanging lamps, engines and trims in that same way.
“DMF is easy to approach because you can sell a rough portion and then play with multiple options for the customer at the time of installation,” Klein says. “So anybody can actually specific a DMF fixture – anybody.”
