Circa Lighting, now Visual Comfort: EPD reality check
Circa Lighting now lives as Visual Comfort & Co., a design‑led powerhouse with showrooms and a deep online catalog. Beautiful fixtures, broad style coverage, and strong brand gravity. The open question for project teams is simple. Do their hero products come with Environmental Product Declarations, and what does that mean for getting spec’d on LEED v5‑minded jobs?
Who they are today
Circa Lighting and Visual Comfort & Co. unified under the Visual Comfort brand in 2022, with a single site at visualcomfort.com by early 2023 (PR Newswire, 2022). The circalighting.com domain now routes customers into that ecosystem, where retail, trade, and wholesale meet under one roof.
What they sell
Visual Comfort spans decorative and some architectural lighting through families like Signature, Studio, and Modern. Expect chandeliers, pendants, sconces, portable/table, floor, outdoor, landscape, plus ceiling fans. The SKU count is easily in the thousands, with dozens of active design collections at any given time. That breadth covers residential, hospitality, and light commercial settings.
EPD coverage at a glance
We found no public, product‑specific EPD library for Visual Comfort as of December 19, 2025, and product pages for likely best‑sellers do not surface EPD links. That suggests low to near‑zero EPD coverage for their decorative catalog today. If internal work is happening, it is not yet visible to specifiers.
Why it matters to getting specified
On projects targeting lower embodied carbon or LEED v5 credits, product‑specific, third‑party verified EPDs avoid conservative generic assumptions. Teams can and do swap to EPD‑backed luminaires when timelines are tight. Without an EPD, a beautiful statement piece often has to work harder on price and preference to stay in the package.
A likely gap, illustrated
Consider Darlana, a perennial lantern family used in entries and amenity spaces. Its product pages list specs and certifications but no downloadable EPDs. Meanwhile, several lighting majors are normalizing EPDs at scale. Signify reports more than 2,000 EPDs covering about 70,000 product variations, a signal that large luminaire portfolios can be documented systematically (Signify, 2024). Fagerhult publishes product‑specific EPDs and even discloses A1–A3 impacts for new pendants, putting comparable numbers on the table (Fagerhult, 2025). iGuzzini lists 2,000+ product codes with PEP Ecopassport entries, which many European projects treat as EPD‑equivalent for electrical products (iGuzzini, 2025).
Competitive set on projects
For decorative and architectural lighting in hospitality, multifamily, workplace, education, and civic work, Visual Comfort often meets Acuity Brands, Signify, Cooper Lighting Solutions, Hubbell Lighting, Fagerhult Group brands, iGuzzini, BEGA, and boutique architectural players. Several of these peers make EPDs routine, so they travel lighter through sustainability reviews.
What PCRs fit these products
There is no single industry‑wide EPD for luminaires. Common paths include PEP Ecopassport rules for luminaires, International EPD System routes that recognize electrical equipment rules, and EPD Hub’s core PCR used by multiple lighting manufacturers. EPD validity is typically five years, then it must be renewed to current rules (EPD Hub, 2025).
The commercial risk and upside
Where owners or GCs ask for EPDs, products without them face a paperwork penalty. Estimators default to conservative numbers, which quietly pushes non‑EPD options down the short‑list. Flip the script with a verified, product‑specific EPD and the same fixture becomes easier to keep in the spec, without racing to the bottom on price. Often a single mid‑sized win pays back the credential work.
A practical starting list for Visual Comfort
- Pick a reference year and nominate a pilot set: one chandelier family, one pendant line, one sconce. Start with the highest‑volume or most‑specified SKUs.
- Select a PCR path your competitors use to maximize comparability on bids, while checking its renewal horizon so your first set doesn’t expire early.
- Align data pulls to manufacturing sites and finishes that drive variance. Then publish, learn, and iterate. Better numbers can follow in the next revision when design or sourcing improves.
Where to track their policy signals
Visual Comfort publishes compliance information, including supply‑chain disclosures, on its site. It is not a sustainability report, but it is a useful breadcrumb trail for specifiers who audit vendors’ practices. See their CA Transparency page.
Threading it together
Visual Comfort owns the design mindshare that moves fixtures from moodboards to installed reality. The missing piece is simple. Make EPDs as visible as finish swatches, starting with the handful of families that show up in every RCP. In a market tilting toward LEED v5 and stricter owner standards, that signal can be the quiet superpower that keeps their icons in the spec. It’s the kind of admin lift teams appreciate because it removes friction and frees them to design. And that’s what wins more work, plain and simple. We definately like simple.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Visual Comfort publish a centralized EPD library for its fixtures?
As of December 19, 2025 we did not find a public, product‑specific EPD library on visualcomfort.com. If EPDs exist for select items, they are not surfaced on common product pages.
Which luminaire EPD routes are commonly accepted on building projects?
Frequent pathways include PEP Ecopassport rules for luminaires, International EPD System entries aligned to EN 15804/ISO 21930, and EPD Hub’s core PCR for electrical products. Validity is typically 5 years (EPD Hub, 2025).
Which competitors have large portfolios with EPDs today?
Examples include Signify reporting 2,000+ EPDs that cover about 70,000 product variations (Signify, 2024) and Fagerhult publishing EPDs for named luminaire families (Fagerhult, 2025). iGuzzini cites 2,000+ product codes with PEP Ecopassport entries (iGuzzini, 2025).
Is there an industry‑wide EPD for LED fixtures Visual Comfort could rely on?
No. There is currently no recognized industry‑wide EPD for LED luminaires across US, EU, or UK markets. Manufacturers typically publish product‑specific EPDs so projects can use measured data rather than generic penalties.
About the Author
With a passion for sustainability and a love for complex data, Toby helps manufacturers efficiently collect data from across their organization and get their EPDs done right. He’s especially interested in how AI can support human expertise, helping R&D and factory teams work faster, smarter, and with less friction.
