SunSetter Brand Guidelines: A 1988 Malden Awning Maker, One TV Ad and Springs Window Fashions

A family trade and a retractable awning for homes.

SunSetter began in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1988. The company’s own history, published on its blog in May 2025, names the founder as Jonathan Hershberg, whose father, Hyman Hershberg, had spent years making roll-up awnings for recreational vehicles. The son set out to make retractable awnings for houses instead, and SunSetter Products started, the company says, just down the street from his father’s old factory. English Wikipedia also gives 1988 as the founding year.

According to the same company history, the first big success was the SunSetter 900 model, which later developed into the 1000XT. As demand grew, Hershberg went into partnership with Ido Eilam and Les Snader. Early sales came from home shows; television, and in particular long-form direct-response advertising, came later and, in the company’s words, made the name familiar across the country.

The Malden base lasted for decades. In September 2018 The Boston Globe described SunSetter as an operation in a plain industrial building near the head of the Malden River, where the workforce doubled to nearly 200 people over the summer and the company assembled and shipped hundreds of awnings a day. English Wikipedia says the range covers motorised and manual deck and patio awnings, with the customer choosing colour and size, and that most are made to attach directly to a building, with one freestanding type.

One commercial, many seasons.

SunSetter’s public face is bound up with one television advertisement. The Boston Globe, in a long feature by Nestor Ramos in September 2018, gave it the tongue-in-cheek title “The Greatest Television Commercial Ever Made” and reported that it had been on air since 2005, running nationally every spring and summer. The paper cited the ad-tracking site iSpot.tv as counting about 800 million airings of the spot since 2012.

The commercial is plain. A suburban couple stand on a sunny deck, explain that the heat kept them indoors, and then sit together under an awning that has rolled out over the patio, with a pitcher of lemonade on the table. The Globe reported that it was written by Jerry Roache and directed by Jeanne Suggs, that a dog walker in the background was unplanned, and that the two actors were brought back more than once to re-record the price as it changed over the years. When SunSetter added an awning with a remote control, the same team filmed a near-identical version; in the end, the paper said, a single new shot of a hand holding the remote was cut into the original.

The company had tried to replace it. SunSetter’s general manager told the Globe that four or five agencies had produced newer, sleeker commercials, with new locations, new scripts, children and minor celebrities, and that each was tested against the original by tracking calls, clicks and eventual sales. The original kept winning, even against a deliberate remake. Inside the company, the paper reported, the working theory was that the market for a house-mounted awning skewed older, so the dated clothes and standard-definition picture had started to work in the spot’s favour as nostalgia.

The paper also described how the airtime was bought: SunSetter purchased unsold blocks of cable news time, known as remnants, and rested the commercial each winter before bringing it back in spring.

Design and documentation.

Blinds, shutters and awnings are sold on how a room looks once they are up, so the companies that make and sell them lean heavily on room-set photography. A typical product page shows a finished window in a kitchen, bedroom or conservatory, often in several light conditions, before it shows the mechanism. Ranges are usually grouped by blind type, such as roller, Roman, Venetian, pleated or vertical, and then again by room, feature and colour, so the menu itself becomes a kind of style guide.

Fabric is the second language of the category. Retailers publish swatches and sample cards, and many offer free samples by post so that customers can hold a fabric against their own walls and daylight. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority noted in 2017 that most made-to-measure blind and shutter sales involve a visit to the customer’s home, where an adviser brings product books and samples; online sellers instead rely on posted samples and measuring guides.

Shutters and awnings bring their own imagery. Shutter pages tend to dwell on louvres, frames and finishes in painted or natural wood, shown open, half-tilted and closed. Awning makers photograph patio canopies extended over terraces and gardens, with the fabric, frame and arm in view, and often show the same canopy retracted against the wall.

Behind the product pages, most of these companies keep a corporate side: a short history of a founder and a first workshop, a list of the brands a group owns, and notes on where things are made. Ownership in the category often runs through larger groups, so a brand page may sit inside a family of sister names that share factories, suppliers or a parent company.

A Springs Window Fashions brand.

SunSetter stopped being an independent Malden company in 2016, when it was bought by Springs Window Fashions, the window-coverings group based in Middleton, Wisconsin, according to The Boston Globe and SunSetter’s own history. In July 2021 PE Professional reported that Clearlake Capital had agreed to buy Springs from AEA Investors and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, and listed SunSetter among Springs’ brands with Bali, Graber, Horizons and Mecho. By June 2023 the same publication was describing Springs as a Clearlake portfolio company.

The move changed where SunSetter works. The company’s 2025 history says its awnings, retractable screens and exterior solar shades are now made in Texas, with business operations in Wisconsin; English Wikipedia places the plant in McAllen, Texas, and SunSetter’s website gives Middleton as its address. Customers can buy direct and fit the product themselves, or use a local independent SunSetter dealer, the company says. Its awnings are sold as the SunSetter Series and the Platinum Series, alongside EasyScreen retractable screens and EasyShade solar screens.

There has also been a federal case. In a complaint filed on 6 April 2023, the US Justice Department alleged that SunSetter had not reported a defect in covers used with its retractable awnings to the Consumer Product Safety Commission in time; the covers had been recalled in August 2019. On 1 April 2025 a federal court in Massachusetts entered a consent decree requiring SunSetter to pay a civil penalty and to maintain a compliance programme. The Justice Department noted that the claims resolved by the decree were allegations only, with no determination of liability.

For a design guide, SunSetter shows how a brand can be carried by one repeated scene rather than a logo system: a deck, a couple, a rolling fabric cover and a plain spoken pitch, kept on air since 2005. Compare the Graber and Bali guides, two other names in the Springs Window Fashions family. For this guide we use awning terracotta, deck brown, patio sand and shade green with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SunSetter’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.