The Engineering
We know, because we spent years ignoring the fixes too. That stops now.
The approach
Most of the friction in a dealer’s week doesn’t live inside the products. It lives in the spec guides that require a manual. In the pricing that feels like it was built to be negotiated. In the dealers who walk into the same house showing the same brand you do. In the manufacturer who doesn’t want to hear your feedback, and wouldn’t change anything if they did.
These aren’t industry realities. They’re problems that got normalized because nobody at scale had the incentive to fix them. Every big brand was working on their own efficiency, not yours.
When we say engineering, we mean the whole thing. Products. Specs. Pricing structure. How markets are protected. How feedback gets turned into product changes. How the brand shows up in a dealer’s quoting software. Every piece of the relationship between a dealer and their supplier was built by someone, which means every piece of it can be rebuilt by someone too.
That someone is us. One fix at a time.
What we’re engineering out
A real accounting of the structural problems we’re fixing. Some are done. Some are in progress. Some we’ve taken a hard position on and won’t move off of.
Spec guides that nobody can actually use.
The industry standard is a 150-page spec guide with different rules for every fabric in the book. Different maximum widths. Different drop limits. Different motor compatibility. Different mounting specs. Your salespeople have to know it. Your installers have to check it. Your office has to verify it on every order. Every exception creates a mistake waiting to happen.
We made a choice when we built our program: every fabric in a sample book runs on the same spec. No exceptions by fabric, no footnotes, no lookup tables. Your salespeople will feel the difference on day one. Your office will feel it on day two.
Manufacturers who don’t listen to the field.
When your installer has a good idea about how a product should be built, most suppliers have no way to hear it. The idea dies on the jobsite. The problem stays broken. Your installer stops bothering to mention it, and everyone just lives with a solvable problem forever.
We built AERIS specifically to close that loop. When a dealer’s installer has feedback, it goes to our Chief Product Officer, Todd, who came up through this industry as an installer himself. He works directly with our factory partner and has the authority to make changes. Real improvements to our products have come from field feedback. Yours could be next.
Five dealers in the same house showing the same brand.
A homeowner requesting three quotes used to get three genuinely different products. Now she gets three versions of the same brand at different prices, because the legacy brands distribute through every channel they can find. The dealer with the lowest overhead wins. Your years of experience and your reputation count for nothing in that conversation.
AERIS doesn’t distribute that way. We don’t sell to box stores, online-only retailers, franchise systems, or national chains. When a dealer in a market shows AERIS, the homeowner isn’t comparing it to two other AERIS quotes. She’s comparing the dealers. The service, the expertise, the fit. That’s the comparison you want to win.
Products that aren’t in the tools dealers actually use.
Most dealers use industry quoting software to build estimates, manage orders, and track their pipeline. When a new product isn’t integrated into those tools, the dealer has to do the work twice. Quote it in their software. Re-enter it in the manufacturer’s system. Errors pile up. Time gets lost. Margin disappears into friction.
We’re integrating AERIS products directly into the dealer quoting tools our partners already use. Some of that work is done. Some is in progress. The goal is simple: if you already know how to quote in your system, you already know how to quote AERIS.
Motors that are louder than they should be.
When a roller shade motor is louder than it should be, there’s almost always a root cause, and it almost always traces back to a cost-cutting decision made upstream. Brackets that are too flimsy. Cassettes with too thin a gauge. Internal brackets that aren’t fully supported. Every one of those decisions saves the manufacturer a few cents per unit and costs the homeowner something every morning.
We spec our hardware differently. Heavier gauge, better support, fuller bracket systems. We pay more for the components and we won’t take the shortcut. When a dealer sells an AERIS motorized shade, the motor sounds the way it should sound.
Roller shades that force a bad tradeoff at install.
The full story on this one is in the next section. Keep reading.
One problem, solved properly
Any product that rolls has to be mounted level, but window openings are never level. That leaves an installer with two choices, and both are bad.
Option one: mount the shade directly to the top of the opening so there’s no gap, and accept that the product will roll crooked. Over time, the fabric skews. The customer calls you. You go back.
Option two: shim the brackets so the shade is mounted truly level, and accept that every window in the house will have a different-sized gap at the top. Now your installer has to explain to the homeowner why the shade in the living room has a quarter-inch gap and the one in the office has three-quarters. Some homeowners accept it. Some don’t.
For years, those were the two options. Nobody fixed it, because the fix costs money and the industry decided a little skew or a little gap was acceptable.
We decided it wasn’t.
We engineered a light-blocking brush strip built directly into the top of the cassette. The installer mounts the shade level. The brush strip covers the variable gap at the top. The homeowner sees a clean, consistent product, and the fabric stays true because the shade is rolling the way it was designed to roll.
The first version worked. It fixed most of the complaints we were getting. But “most” wasn’t good enough. We were still hearing from installers and homeowners where the gap was just a little larger than the brush strip could cover.
So we made it taller.
It cost more. We did it anyway, because a product that works most of the time is a product that will still generate service calls some of the time. And service calls are the installer’s problem to deal with, not the manufacturer’s.
That’s the decision we make every time a problem like this comes up. Pay more, fix it properly, and make the installer’s week easier. The margin hit is ours to take. That’s what being a real partner to independent dealers actually looks like.
“If a customer is complaining about it, it is an engineering problem.”
The AERIS Engineering Standard
How this work actually gets done
Engineering this many structural problems takes a team, not a hero. Our Chief Product Officer, Todd, came up through this industry as an installer and now leads product engineering. When a motor is louder than it should be, when a bracket isn’t supporting what it needs to support, when a tab design is creating a fabric gap that shouldn’t be there, those fixes run through Todd.
Other leaders own their own domains. The complexity of specs and the operational systems we run are owned by people who have spent years actually running a dealer business. The way we show up in dealer quoting tools, the way pricing is structured, the way a market is defined, those decisions sit with leaders who know the dealer side from the inside.
My job is to make sure all of it adds up. Product engineering that ignores the spec system creates a great product nobody can order. Operations engineering that ignores pricing creates a clean system nobody can make money on. Brand engineering that ignores the product creates a pretty catalog nobody wants to install. Every piece has to work with every other piece, and the integration point is the dealer’s actual experience running their business.
That’s the work. Nobody is engineering everything. We’re each engineering the pieces we know best, and we’re making sure the pieces fit.
Where we are
AERIS is a long build, and the engineering work is the long part. Every product in our line will have multiple versions over time. Every system we run will be refined. Every friction point we haven’t gotten to yet is on a list that we’re working through.
We’d rather tell you what we’ve actually fixed than pretend we’ve fixed it all. If you’re looking for a supplier who claims everything is already perfect, there are bigger brands for that. If you want to build with a team that’s genuinely doing the work, one problem at a time, we’d like to meet.