Everyone involved should win.

I want to tell you how I got here, because I think it matters.

In 2001, I was working on the Las Vegas Strip, putting myself through community college. I wanted to be a paramedic. My wife and I had just bought our first little house, our first car, and we had a baby on the way. Then 9/11 happened. Tourism collapsed. I got laid off along with half the city.

I took a job delivering pizzas at night and a door-to-door canvassing job during the day. The canvassing gig was for a small window covering company, and the whole thing was supposed to be temporary. But I noticed something. The salesman I was setting appointments for was making more than I was, and he wasn’t working nearly as hard. So I talked my way into his seat.

I was green. I wasn’t a great salesperson. But I outworked everyone, and it worked. A year later, in 2002, my brother and I left and started our own blind company. We figured if we were going to work this hard, we ought to work for ourselves.

We had no idea what we were doing. The bigger we got, the worse it got. Eventually we parted ways. I moved to Arizona in 2006 and went back to being a one-man show. Door knocking. Subbing out the installs. Building it up from nothing again. I stayed solo until 2012.

Then I got hungry for something bigger. I started adding people, one at a time. A showroom. A marketing plan. A team. Then a box store partnership that pulled us into new markets, year after year, state after state. At our peak we had 61 employees, were doing $17 million in revenue across four states, and on paper it looked like I’d figured it out.

But I hadn’t.

Scaling that fast taught me what’s actually hard about this business. Finding the right people. Keeping them. Building systems that don’t fall apart the moment you turn your back. Managing installers, salespeople, and admin across four different markets. I learned most of it the hard way, by breaking things first and fixing them second.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I started noticing something about our industry.

It used to be simpler. We had real relationships with our manufacturers. Programs were easy. Then the consolidation started. The regional brands I grew up with got bought up. Each rollup meant fewer choices, more similar products on every shelf, and programs that got more complicated by the year. Spec guides went from a few pages to a hundred and fifty. Quality slipped. Orders came back wrong.

And then the manufacturers started buying our competitors.

One of our primary suppliers bought our biggest local competitor and started undercutting us in our own market overnight. My supplier had become my competitor. That was the last straw.

That’s when something deeper clicked for me. This wasn’t just a supplier problem. The whole industry framework had a ceiling built into it. Consolidated suppliers, complicated programs, manufacturers competing with the dealers who stocked their product. The system was working exactly the way it was designed to work. And the design capped what an independent dealer could become. I knew I had to build something different. What I didn’t fully grasp at the time was how long it was going to take.

It took us three years to detach from the box store and the legacy brands we depended on. Three years of running the old business and building the new one at the same time. We flew to China. We met factory after factory. Most of them weren’t right. A few were capable but didn’t make the products the way we needed them made. We kept looking. We kept testing. The business I’d built over two and a half decades was the thing paying the bills, and we were spending nights and weekends trying to replace it on our own terms.

I didn’t do any of this alone, and that matters. Over the years we’ve built a team of people who are genuinely great at what they do. Capable, dedicated, and in this with me. Todd, our Chief Product Officer, came up as an installer before he led product development, which means when a dealer’s installer has a good idea about how something should be built, the person on the other end of that conversation has actually been on the ladder. The rest of the team is the same caliber. People who have lived this industry and decided to build something worth being proud of.

When we finally found the right manufacturing partners, the work had barely started. The products they had weren’t good enough to compete at the level we sell at. So we started engineering. Piece by piece. Bracket by bracket. Fabric by fabric. We went point by point through every piece of friction that exists in a dealer’s week and started rebuilding the way it should be done.

Here’s the honest part. We’re nowhere near finished. AERIS today is better than what we had. AERIS a year from now will be better than today. This is a long, intentional build, and it’s going to take a lot more time before it becomes the brand we want it to be.

That’s also the part I’m most excited about. Building something worth building takes time. You already know that. You’ve been doing it yourself.

In the middle of all this, I made another call most founders don’t talk about publicly. I deliberately contracted Southwest Blinds. We exited markets. We ended the box store partnership. We went from four states back to two. From $17 million back to a smaller, healthier, more profitable business focused on the work we actually wanted to do.

Twenty-five years is a long time to run a business in one industry. In that time, we’ve hired, trained, and worked alongside more than a hundred people across installation, sales, and operations. We’ve negotiated with dozens of manufacturers. We’ve watched employees start as entry-level and grow into leadership roles that now run the company. Most of what I know about this industry was paid for with time, money, and mistakes. I mention it here because AERIS isn’t our first rodeo. Every engineering decision, every program decision, every commitment we make to a dealer is informed by decades of watching what works and what doesn’t in the real world.

That sounds like a failure story. It’s the opposite. It’s the best decision I’ve made as an operator. Growth isn’t the same thing as winning. Sometimes the smart move is smaller, tighter, and more profitable, with better people, better margins, and your name still on it.

AERIS was built to supply Southwest Blinds & Shutters first. My own retail operation. It wasn’t theory. It wasn’t a pitch deck. It was a working program we used on real jobs every day before we ever offered it to another dealer. Once it was working, I opened it up to a small number of dealers I thought would appreciate what we’re building.

Here’s what I believe, and it’s why we built AERIS the way we did. Everyone involved should win. The manufacturer, the brand, and the dealer all have to be healthy, profitable, and respected for any of this to work. When one party wins at the expense of another, the system breaks. I’ve watched it happen too many times. I’m not interested in building another version of it.

There’s something else I believe about this, and I want to say it out loud. The ceiling the industry built for independent dealers isn’t something we’re trying to work around. We’re trying to break it.

What happens when you give independent dealers access to a premium brand that actually belongs to their channel? A brand that’s exclusive to the independent dealer world. Easy to work with. Built for scale. When those things exist, the math on running an independent window treatment business changes. You stop competing against the consolidation by trying to be scrappier than them. You start competing by having something they don’t have and can’t buy. A real, premium alternative built for the independent channel.

That’s the bigger bet I’m making. AERIS isn’t just a better supplier. Built right, it becomes the unlock that lets independent dealers scale profitably and build something valuable. A path to a bigger business without giving up what made the business yours in the first place. That’s what I’m working toward for Southwest Blinds, and that’s what I want for every dealer in this network.

So we run AERIS with a few non-negotiables. We don’t stab our dealers in the back. We don’t sell to box stores or online-only retailers or national chains. We don’t ask for volume commitments. We don’t force you to carry our full line. We start with one product and earn our way into the rest of your business.

We want serious operators. The kind of dealer who’s been doing this long enough to know what good looks like. Who takes the craft seriously. Who’s tired of being treated like an account number by suppliers who used to know their name.