From Westchester Fabrics to a Soho storefront.

The Shade Store tells its story across three generations. In an “About us” page the company published in the early 2010s, it says the story begins in 1946, when the brothers’ grandfather Milton, who had started his career in the textile industry, founded Westchester Fabrics in Mount Vernon, New York, with help from his brother Jack. The company says the business built its name on its fabrics and its customer service, and that this was the foundation for what came later.

The second generation arrived in the 1970s. According to the same company history, Cliff Gibbs, Milton’s son-in-law, joined the family business in the period the company labels 1970–1980, bringing new ideas to its window-treatment work. The company describes Westchester Fabrics in those years as a growing authority on window treatments.

The move into retail followed in 1996. The company says Cliff Gibbs, with his sons Adam, Ian and Zach, opened Home Works, a custom window-treatment storefront in Westchester, New York, and that a second store opened in Soho in 2000. It presents Milton’s values of service, quality and value as the compass for the family through these changes.

The Shade Store itself came next. In its own history the company says it was founded in 2005 by Milton’s four grandsons — Adam, Ian and Zach Gibbs and Greg Spatz — with the aim of offering custom-made window treatments with expert service. A press release issued by Leonard Green & Partners in August 2018 gives the founding year as 2006 and names the same four people as co-founders. The company dates its own production facility to 2006.

Showrooms, designer partnerships and new owners.

The early Shade Store was built around making things in-house. The company says that in 2006 it opened a production facility of its own to keep its quality standards consistent, and that the facility also handled research into lower-impact materials and shipping methods. That account sits alongside the business’s description of itself, in the same history, as offering custom-made products at accessible prices with specialist advice.

Showrooms followed. The company says that between 2007 and 2009, after launching its website and a new catalogue, it opened showrooms in Soho and Midtown Manhattan, in Port Chester, New York, and in San Francisco. In the same period it formed partnerships with designers and fabric houses, naming Chilewich, DwellStudio and Robert Allen, and it says its products could be seen in Robert Allen showrooms.

Outside investors arrived in the 2010s. The Leonard Green & Partners press release of 9 August 2018, datelined Port Chester, says that Great Hill Partners acquired a majority stake in The Shade Store in 2013, partnering with the four co-founders. The same release announced that The Shade Store had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Leonard Green & Partners, with Great Hill as the seller, and said the transaction was expected to close in the third quarter of 2018.

That release also set out how the business described itself at the time. It called The Shade Store a family-run business, said its window treatments were handcrafted in the USA, hung and tested before shipping, and listed free swatches, measurements, photo rendering and installation among its services. It said the company had exclusive partnerships with RH, Kravet, Sunbrella, Nate Berkus and Jonathan Adler, among others. Adam Gibbs, named as co-founder and chief executive, was to continue leading the business with the existing management team.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell window coverings: blinds, shades, shutters and the fabrics and mechanisms behind them. Window-covering brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that cut each blind to order to names that now belong to much larger home-furnishings groups, and the same name can reach a buyer through a showroom, a decorator, a catalogue or a website.

A window-covering brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name, a swatch book, a showroom and the promise of a made-to-measure fit, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its blinds and shades are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name for custom work, sold through showrooms.

The Shade Store’s identity is built on two ideas that run through its own account of itself. The first is lineage: the company frames its history as three generations of experience, from Milton’s fabric business in Mount Vernon to Cliff Gibbs’s storefronts and on to the four grandsons who started The Shade Store. The second is custom work: in the company’s telling, and in the 2018 press release, the products are made to order rather than taken off a shelf.

The name itself is plain: The Shade Store describes a product and a place to buy it. Its early slogan, “Custom Made Simple”, which the company used on its website in the early 2010s with a registered-trademark mark, sets out the promise in three words: made-to-order products presented as an easy purchase.

The visual side of that promise is the showroom and the swatch. The company’s history moves from a single storefront in Westchester to showrooms in Manhattan, Port Chester and San Francisco, and the 2018 release lists free swatches and photo rendering among its services. The partnerships the company names — Chilewich, DwellStudio and Robert Allen in its own history, and RH, Kravet, Sunbrella, Nate Berkus and Jonathan Adler in the 2018 release — tie the brand to the fabric and interiors world in which the family business began.

For a design guide, The Shade Store shows how a family fabric heritage, a plain descriptive name and a showroom-and-swatch experience can carry a custom-made product. Compare a retailer named among its partners in our RH brand guidelines and a long-established maker of blinds and drapery hardware in our Graber brand guidelines. For this guide we use slate, linen, sage and woven tan with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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