A lighting company from 1938, a buyer from the Bronx and a home in Northeast Ohio.

Kichler is an American brand of decorative lighting and ceiling fans based in Ohio. Its products run from chandeliers, pendants and wall sconces for the inside of a house to outdoor lanterns and the low garden lights sold as landscape lighting. The company dates the brand to 1938. A press release issued by Kingswood Capital Management on 19 September 2024 gave that year for Kichler’s founding, and the adviser Lincoln International, in its 2024 note on the same sale, described Kichler as founded in 1938 and headquartered in Solon, Ohio. A Kichler announcement of 28 January 2026 opens its company description with the same date.

The company traded under a longer legal name. The corporate-finance firm Oaklins reported on 11 May 2018 that its Cleveland team had advised L.D. Kichler Co., which it called a designer of decorative lighting products, on its sale to Masco Corporation.

Ownership in Northeast Ohio passed to the Minoff family. The Cleveland Jewish News reported on 12 April 2023 that Sam Minoff had acquired Kichler Lighting in the 1950s. His son Roy was quoted in the article saying that his father “bought into Kichler in the mid-1950s” because he had always wanted to own a business of his own. The paper said Minoff grew up in the Bronx, in New York, graduated from Stuyvesant High School, served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and then came to Cleveland, where he and his wife Clare started their family.

The same Cleveland Jewish News report, published after his death on 8 April 2023, recalled him as a figure known for his generosity in the region. It said his support had led University Hospitals to rename its Chagrin Highland Health Center in Orange, Ohio, as the UH Minoff Health Center, and that he had also supported the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The company’s offices have been in suburbs of Cleveland. Crain’s Cleveland Business described Kichler as Independence-based in January 2018, and a Kichler press release of January 2020 still carried an Independence, Ohio, dateline. By December 2022 the company’s releases were datelined Solon, Ohio, and a Kichler announcement of that month called Solon home to the company’s headquarters.

Masco in 2018, Kingswood in 2024 and the Coleto Brands name in 2025.

A sale to a listed company came in 2018. Crain’s Cleveland Business reported on 8 January 2018 that Masco Corporation of Livonia, Michigan, a maker of branded home improvement and building products, had signed a definitive agreement to buy Kichler. The paper described Kichler as a developer of decorative residential and light commercial lighting products, ceiling fans and LED lighting systems for consumer and professional distribution channels, and said Masco intended to report its results within its Decorative Architectural Products segment. In the same announcement Masco disclosed that it had bought another Northeast Ohio firm, Mercury Plastics of Middlefield. On 12 March 2018, Crain’s reported that the acquisition had been completed and that Kichler was now officially part of Masco.

Masco then put the business up for sale. On 3 September 2024 the trade site Electrical Trends published a letter that Kichler’s president, Vijay Shankar, had sent to customers that day. It said Masco had entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Kichler Lighting business to an affiliate of Kingswood Capital Management, a private investment firm based in Los Angeles and the owner of Progress Lighting, and that Kingswood intended to merge the two companies. Shankar’s letter referred to Kichler’s “85-year foundation”.

Kingswood announced the completed purchase on 19 September 2024. Its release said it had acquired Kichler Lighting, LLC from Masco and would merge it with Progress Lighting, LLC, with both brands kept in the market; it gave 1906 as the founding year of Progress and 1938 for Kichler. Sean Veit, Progress’s former chief executive, was named chief executive of the combined company, and Shankar its executive chairman. Kingswood Capital Management has owned Kichler since that September 2024 sale.

The combined business took a name of its own a few months later. In a release datelined Greenville, South Carolina, on 7 January 2025, the company announced that the parent of the merged Kichler and Progress Lighting organisation would be called Coleto Brands. The release said the name was inspired by starlings, whose flocks come together in the shifting patterns known as a murmuration, and said both brands would continue to operate as independent brands under the same corporation. It added that the two brands would now be represented by a single rep-agency sales force, and that Kingswood had acquired Progress Lighting from Hubbell Incorporated in February 2024.

The footer of Kichler’s own website, read in October 2026, describes Kichler Lighting LLC as a division of Coleto Brands.

Design and documentation.

The packaging around a household light is what a shopper sees on the shelf before buying it. A bulb arrives in a small box or a sleeve; a ceiling fixture or wall light arrives in a printed carton; a switch, outlet or dimmer arrives in a blister card or a narrow box hung on a peg; a wall plate may be sold loose with nothing but a label. Each format leaves a different amount of room for a name, a colour and a picture of the thing inside.

Because so much of this category is bought on a shelf in a hardware store or a home centre, the identity tends to be carried by repetition rather than by a single object: the same colour band across a run of boxes, the same lettering on a carton end, the same layout on a card hanging beside dozens of others.

The guides in this group look at those outer layers: the names, the marks and the colour habits that a company puts on its boxes, cartons and cards, alongside the history of who made the products and who owns the name today.

Updated Traditional, a landscape line with its own rewards programme and two brands under one roof.

Much of what Kichler says about its design shows up in how it names and groups its fixtures. In a release of 8 January 2020, the company said it had adopted an “Updated Traditional” style and applied it to new products, describing clean, minimal designs with classic elements. It named the Capitol Hill collection, with a dome or basket silhouette offered as pendants, sconces and chandeliers, and the Darton, with a tapered glass shade in brushed natural brass or classic pewter. The release quoted Jeff Dross, then Kichler’s corporate director of education and industry, and invited buyers to see the pieces at the company’s booth at the Dallas Lightovation trade show.

Outdoor lighting became its own strand of the brand. Kichler said in a release of 15 December 2022 that its landscape team was marking the thirtieth anniversary of its landscape lighting business. The company said it ran a contractor programme called LightPro Rewards, and that, to mark the occasion, it was donating exterior LED fixtures and path lights to the clubhouse of the Grantwood Golf Course as part of a City of Solon revitalisation project.

The places where the brand is sold shape how it presents itself. Kingswood’s 2024 release said Kichler products were available at independent showrooms, at Lowe’s and The Home Depot, through electrical and landscape distributors and online, and Lincoln International listed the showroom, landscape, electrical, e-commerce and home-centre channels.

Since the merger the brand has increasingly been shown beside its new sibling. The January 2025 Coleto Brands release said the Progress Lighting showroom in the Dallas Market Center had been refreshed to include a Kichler display area for that month’s Lightovation show. A release published by the KBIS trade show on 28 January 2026 said Kichler and Progress Lighting would share a single booth at KBIS 2026 in Orlando from 17 to 19 February, under parent company Coleto Brands. It quoted Kristina Christopher, Coleto Brands’ vice-president of marketing, saying the booth would show how each brand was evolving while making it easy to work across both. The same release described Kichler’s range as spanning interior, exterior, architectural and landscape lighting and ceiling fans.

For a design guide, Kichler shows a lighting name kept distinct through a change of owner and a merger: the brand stays on its own fixtures and cartons while its parent company changes around it. Compare the Feit Electric and Lithonia guides for other American lighting names. For this guide we use bronze, brass and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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