Chauvet Brand Guidelines: From a Florida Rope-Light Warehouse to Moving Heads and Consoles

A warehouse in North Miami Beach.

Chauvet began in Florida in 1990, when Albert and Berenice Chauvet started a business distributing rope lights from a warehouse in North Miami Beach, according to the company’s own history. The trade magazine PE Professional, writing in March 2017, gives the same founders and founding year. The company says it soon became a developer and OEM supplier of entertainment lighting — making products that other brands sold under their own names.

The move to its own name came at the end of that decade. In 1998, the company says, it moved to an office and warehouse in Hollywood, Florida, leased a larger facility nearby, and shifted from supplying other brands to distributing lighting under the Chauvet name. The legal name of the business is Chauvet & Sons; the private-equity firm Cortec Group, announcing its investment in April 2016, described it as a developer of entertainment and lighting equipment based in Sunrise, Florida.

Sunrise has been the base since 2010. That year, the company says, it opened its world headquarters in a 75,000-square-foot building there and launched a subsidiary in the United Kingdom. A California branch and a subsidiary and distribution centre in Mexico followed in 2013, a second European distribution centre in Belgium in 2015, and a French subsidiary and an expansion into Germany in 2018. The company opened a facility in Las Vegas in 2020 and, in 2022, the Chauvet Experience Center there, a space for showing its lighting.

Some business directories place the company in Fort Lauderdale or Davie; its own materials and the trade press give Sunrise, a city in Broward County west of Fort Lauderdale.

One name, split in two.

For most of its first two decades Chauvet sold lighting under one name. In 2008 it added ILUMINARC, a brand for architectural lighting, and in 2010, the company says, it separated its entertainment ranges into CHAUVET Professional and CHAUVET DJ. The CHAUVET Professional logo was introduced in 2011, and a new CHAUVET DJ logo followed in 2012, according to the company’s timeline.

The two names point at different buyers. The CHAUVET DJ website describes fixtures that “set up in minutes” and “require no complicated programming”, and it describes Chauvet as an early seller of affordable LED colour-mixing fixtures. Among the awards it lists are dealer-voted “Lighting Line of the Year” honours from the music-retail magazine MMR and a NAMM Milestone Award for 25 years of service.

CHAUVET Professional is the touring and theatre side. In 2012 it launched Ovation, which the company describes as a full theatrical line of more than 25 fixtures, including profiles, Fresnels, PARs and house lights; the same year it started TRUSST, a line of truss and presentation accessories. Its moving heads were organised in series: the Rogue range came first, and in March 2016 LSi Online reported that the new Maverick series — touring-grade moving lights, starting with a wash, a hybrid and a spot — would make its official debut at Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt. Albert Chauvet, quoted as president and founder, described the aim as tour-grade features at an accessible level.

Control came next. In 2017 Chauvet bought ChamSys, the Southampton maker of MagicQ lighting consoles. PE Professional reported in March 2017 that ChamSys would operate as an independent business unit, with its founders remaining as managing directors.

Light, rigs and control.

Stage and entertainment lighting is sold to a small, technical audience — lighting designers, programmers, rental companies and venue technicians — and its makers present themselves accordingly. The product is the picture: moving heads, LED washes and profile fixtures photographed against black, often with a single beam cutting through haze, so that the shape and colour of the light carry the message rather than the housing.

Much of that presentation happens on the show floor. Fixture makers routinely launch new products at trade shows such as Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt, PLASA in London and LDI in Las Vegas, and their stands are built as small productions, with timed light shows and rigs of their own fixtures. Robe, for instance, marked its twentieth anniversary at PLASA in 2014, and Claypaky first showed its one-word logo at LDI in 2016, according to trade reports and the company.

Ranges are usually split by use. Touring fixtures are sold on output, speed and weight; theatre fixtures on quiet running, framing and colour rendering; architectural lines on outdoor ratings and long-term installation. Control is its own category, and several fixture makers now also own console or data brands, so screenshots of control-desk interfaces sit beside photographs of the lights themselves.

The visual language that results is consistent across the sector: dark backgrounds, saturated beams, and colour-temperature scales running from warm to cool white. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its fixtures are made — and attributes to the company anything that rests on its own word.

Founders, then private equity.

Chauvet stayed in its founders’ hands for a quarter of a century. In 2016 Cortec Group made what it called a significant investment in Chauvet & Sons through its sixth fund, alongside management; the deal closed in March 2016, Cortec said. At the time Cortec listed four main brands: CHAUVET DJ, CHAUVET Professional, ILUMINARC and TRUSST.

Under Cortec the group grew by acquisition. After ChamSys in 2017, Chauvet bought Kino Flo, the maker of film and television lighting, in 2021 and LynTec, a supplier of electrical power control, in 2023 — both deals recorded by the law firm Jones Day, which advised Cortec. The company’s timeline adds Juice Goose, a maker of power distribution equipment, in 2024 and LiteGear, a supplier of LED lighting for motion pictures, in 2025.

In November 2023 Cortec sold Chauvet & Sons to Court Square Capital Partners, according to Jones Day’s record of the deal, which describes Chauvet as an innovator, developer and manufacturer of lighting and control systems for entertainment. Cortec said Albert Chauvet would continue to lead the business.

Today the CHAUVET DJ website presents “a family of trusted names”: CHAUVET DJ, CHAUVET Professional, Kino Flo, LiteGear, ChamSys and LynTec. It lists company facilities in Florida and California, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Mexico, France and Germany, alongside a network of dealers and distributors. The brand that began with rope lights now spans DJ effects, theatre fixtures, touring moving heads, consoles and film lighting.

For a design guide, Chauvet shows how a company can split one name into separate ranges — a DJ brand that promises quick set-up and a professional brand built around theatre and touring — while keeping the family name in capitals on both. Compare Elation, another American lighting brand that grew out of DJ equipment, and ETC, the theatre-lighting maker from Wisconsin. For this guide we use stage black, amber and a deep blue with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Chauvet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.