Our Philosophy
I've been a dealer for over twenty-five years. AERIS is the model I wish I'd had the whole time.
Have you ever hired a new salesperson, excited to get them trained and in front of customers, only to watch them drown in the complexity? They showed up thinking “it’s just blinds.” Then you handed them a 150-page spec guide and watched the light go out of their eyes.
Have you ever had an installer come to you fired up about a fix for a product problem they see every week on jobsites, a real, solvable thing, and you had to tell them the truth? That the idea has nowhere to go. That the manufacturer isn’t listening, and there’s no one to send it to anyway. So you both just keep living with a broken product.
Have you ever watched a brand new dealer open up around the corner and start selling the same product for less, not because they’re buying it cheaper, but because they have no overhead and no margin to protect? Years of your loyalty, your expertise, your reputation, devalued overnight by someone who hasn’t earned it yet.
If any of that sounds familiar, you already know why AERIS exists.
I started selling blinds in 2001 in Las Vegas, door to door. I opened my own shop in 2002 with my brother, ran it as a one-man show for years, and eventually grew to 61 employees doing $17 million across four states. I learned how to run this business the hard way. By breaking it and rebuilding it more times than I’d like to admit.
And over those two and a half decades, I watched our industry change in ways that made it harder, not easier, to run a good company.
The regional manufacturers I had personal relationships with got bought up. The spec guides got longer. The programs got more complicated. Quality slipped. And then the manufacturers started buying our competitors, the national retailers, so the people supplying my business became the people trying to take it.
That was the last straw for me. What eventually clicked is that this wasn’t just a supplier problem. The whole industry framework had a ceiling built into it, and no amount of better operating was going to break through it. I went looking for a different way.
AERIS is what I found. And then built. We started by going overseas to meet the factories behind the factories. We found partners who were fast, accurate, and actually eager to work with us. The products weren’t good enough yet, so we started engineering. Point by point, we’re fixing the things that make a dealer’s week harder.
AERIS was built to supply my own retail operation first. Once it was working for us, we opened it to dealers who wanted the same thing.
“The manufacturers started buying our competitors. The people supplying my business became the people trying to take it.”
— James Hutchings, Founder
We don’t work against our dealers.
We won’t undercut you, drop in another dealer behind your back, or sell around you. Your loyalty should mean something, and that’s how we show it.
We listen to the people who sell and install our products.
When your installer has an idea, it goes somewhere. That’s the whole point of building this the way we did.
We keep specs simple.
Every fabric in a sample book runs on the same spec. No 65 pages of exceptions. Your salespeople and your office will feel the difference on day one.
We pick up the phone.
You’re working with us, not a call center. If something’s wrong, you’ll know who to call and they’ll know your name.
We build for the long game.
Every decision gets run through one question: does this help our dealers win?
This is for the dealer who’s been doing this long enough to know what good looks like, and is tired of settling. The one who takes the craft seriously. Who wants a partner, not a vendor.
If that sounds like you, let’s talk.