(Souce:Inside Lighting)

For a lighting agency that has operated independently for nearly seventy years, Thomas Harris & Co. is about to undergo the biggest change in its history: becoming part of something much larger than itself.

SESCO Lighting announced it will acquire Thomas Harris & Co., a Virginia-based lighting and controls specification agency, effective January 1, 2027. Founded in 1958 and led for the past 34 years by Steve Clarke and Nancy Clarke, Thomas Harris has spent nearly seven decades as an independent agency serving distributors, contractors, engineers, architects, and end users in Virginia. According to SESCO's announcement, the Thomas Harris team will continue serving Virginia customers while drawing on SESCO's broader resources and manufacturer portfolio.

The Thomas Harris acquisition extends SESCO's geography into the Mid-Atlantic for the first time, a region the company has not previously touched. Genlyte Solutions, Signify's core lighting line, is SESCO's primary manufacturer partner in nearly every market it serves, and the company has a track record of acquiring its way into a state first and picking up the Genlyte line second.

For context, when SESCO acquired The Schneider Company in South Carolina in 2021, Schneider didn't carry Genlyte; SESCO got the line there afterward. The same pattern played out in Kentucky: SESCO entered the state through its 2025 acquisition of Engineered Lighting Sales, which didn't hold Genlyte either, and picked up the territory rights about a year later when Signify realigned them away from LightSpec.