About Us

Our Story

We started in a basement in 2002. Twenty-four years later there are twenty-two of us on Baseline Road, and the work hasn’t changed — helping the people who design buildings get the light right.

Flux is a manufacturer’s agent. We represent more than ninety lighting, controls and shading lines across Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec, and we sit on the design side of the table: we’re who an architect, an interior designer or an electrical engineer calls when the ceiling plan is still a sketch and the lighting budget is still a guess.

What that actually means

Being an agent — a manufacturer’s representative — isn’t the same as being a dealer or a distributor, and the difference matters to the people who work with us.

We don’t sell you a box. We help you specify a building. We’re involved before there’s a purchase order — reading the drawings, running the numbers, finding the fixture that does the job, and staying on the file through submittals, approvals and site visits until the last luminaire is aimed and the control system is commissioned. The order goes through a distributor to the electrical contractor. The thinking is ours, and it starts long before anyone orders anything.

The practical upside for the design team: bring us in early and the lighting budget stops being a surprise at tender.

Flux Lighting showroom, Ottawa — the open office area, with desks under a wide wire pendant, a lit cove overhead and roller shades on the glazing.

Flux Lighting showroom, Ottawa — a console wall of lit table lamps, pendants and sconces beside the games table.

How a Flux project runs

Most agencies are a sales desk with a catalogue behind it. We’re built differently — six departments, each of which does one part of the job properly.

Sales — your point of contact, split by who you are. Architects and interior designers, electrical engineers, general and electrical contractors, and electrical distributors and dealers each have someone whose whole job is that relationship.
Technical Applications and Field Support — the engine room. Photometric calculations are run in-house by our own technical staff, along with control-system design and commissioning. Field support starts before the fixtures do: pre-wire visits with the electrical contractor, and a site walk ahead of installation when a fixture is complicated enough to cause trouble later. If something on site isn’t behaving, someone comes out.
Quotations — budget pricing, alternates and approved-equal packages. Real spec work gets priority in the queue.
Projects — submittals, approvals, purchase orders, lead times and delivery coordination. The part nobody thanks you for and everybody notices when it goes wrong.
Marketing and Sales Support — product training and lunch-and-learns, delivered at your office or ours.
Accounting — the invoicing and paperwork that keeps a job from stalling over an administrative detail.

You get a team, not a rep. If your project coordinator is away, the file doesn’t stop.

Controls is where we’re different

Most agencies treat lighting controls as an accessory. We treat it as the project.

Controls is our largest business, and it’s the reason we’re in the room at design development rather than at tender. We design the control system alongside the photometric calculations that drive it — so the sequence of operation, the fixture selection and the light levels are one decision, not three. The most recent example: at HISTORY Ottawa we designed, programmed and commissioned a Lutron Athena system running architectural white light, colour-changing elements and emergency lighting through a single interface.

If the controls scope on your project is still open, that’s the moment to call us.

Flux Lighting showroom, Ottawa — the dining table under a linear pendant cluster, with the whole room lit warm.

Flux Lighting showroom, Ottawa — finish and colour samples spread across a table, with metal discs, fabric swatches and painted chips under review.

The showroom

Our Baseline Road showroom is open by appointment, and it earns its keep. It’s where a finish swatch stops being a swatch, where a client sees the difference between 2700K and 3000K on their own material sample, and where a mock-up settles an argument that three emails couldn’t.

Book time and bring your samples. We’ll set it up.

The people

Twenty-two people, and most of them have been here a long time. Our three principals still carry accounts and still show up on site.

We work at being somewhere people want to stay. Summer hours, so Friday afternoons in July belong to you. An annual golf tournament, a summer kick-off, a Christmas party, a volleyball team that takes the tournament rather more seriously than the standings justify, and whatever else someone talks the office into that year.

None of that is why you work with us. But it’s why the same person is still on your file three years later, and why someone picks it up without being asked when they’re away. Low turnover is a service feature.

The leadership

Portrait of Jeff, a Flux Lighting team member.

Jeff Fitch

Principal

Portrait of Mara, a Flux Lighting team member.

Mara Klammrodt

Principal

Portrait of Francis, a Flux Lighting team member.

Francis Hodgson

Principal

Meet the Full Flux Team

Where we work

We work across commercial, government, institutional, education, healthcare, hospitality and retail projects in Ottawa, Gatineau and across Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.

Tell us what the building has to do

Call 613-592-9948, email info@fluxlighting.ca, or book an hour in the showroom. If the project has a residential component, our residential side has its own site.

Get in touch