A Philadelphia company, a train blind and a Venetian named for a flag maker.

Bali is a brand of blinds, shades, shutters and drapery that belongs to Springs Window Fashions, the window-covering company based in Middleton, Wisconsin. The name itself dates from the 1960s, but the company behind it tells a much longer story. On its “Our Story” page, as archived in May 2026, Bali traces its roots to 1864, when, it says, a surgeon, Dr. Elias Carey, started a company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to design lamps for horse-drawn carriages.

The account that follows is the company’s own, and it moves through transport before it reaches the home. Bali says that in 1906 the Carey Company turned to curtains and curtain rollers for automobiles and to Venetian blinds for trains. By the 1930s, it says, the Pennsylvania business had become Carey-McFall, and it introduced the Betsy Ross Venetian Blind, a wooden-slatted blind named after the Philadelphia flag maker.

The company says that during the Second World War its factories were turned over to the war effort, and that after the war it returned to Venetian blinds made with lighter aluminium in place of wood. That change of material is the hinge of the story Bali tells about itself, because the new metal slats made a narrower, neater blind possible.

In the 1960s, Bali says, the company designed the Bali Custom Mini Blind, with 1-inch slats and invisible tapes, and that product launched the Bali brand. The name was therefore a product name first: a label for a particular blind before it became the umbrella for a range of window coverings.

Narrower slats, a move to Wisconsin and a family of brands.

The range widened in the following decades. Bali says that in the 1980s it created the Bali half-inch mini blind, whose narrower slats gave a sleeker look, and that the brand then added vertical blinds and pleated fabric shades. It also says the company introduced the Bali Ultra Blind, with an all-in-one cord control.

The decisive change in ownership came at the end of that decade. Bali says that in 1989 Carey-McFall joined the Springs family and moved its headquarters from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, while its customer service centre stayed at the original Pennsylvania location. The corporate history of Springs Window Fashions, as archived in 2024, gives the same year from the other side: in 1989, it says, the Bali brand was added to the Springs Window Fashion Division, the same year the company marked its fiftieth anniversary with a party at Lakeview Park in Middleton.

That Middleton business had its own origins. Springs Window Fashions says John N. Graber created the Badger Drapery Crane in 1932, that a plant opened in Middleton in 1946, and that Springs Mills purchased Graber in 1979. Bali therefore joined a company built around another family name, Graber, which remains a sister brand.

Springs Window Fashions’ timeline lists further additions after Bali, among them Nanik in 1999, MechoSystems in 2015, SunSetter in 2016 and Sunburst Shutters & Window Fashions in 2023. It says contract manufacturing began in Reynosa, Mexico, in 1997, and that in 2021 the company came under new ownership by Clearlake Capital Group. Clearlake has owned Springs Window Fashions since 2021, according to that history.

For Bali itself, the company names several product milestones after the move. It says Bali Wood Blinds and Shutters, made from North American hardwood at its plant in Grayling, Michigan, were introduced in 2003; that Bali Solar Shades followed in 2004; that Bali Drapery launched in 2013; and that Bali Sheer and Layered Shades arrived in 2016. Its site, as archived in May 2026, lists cellular, roller, Roman and woven natural shades alongside wood, faux wood and vertical blinds, shutters, drapery and motorisation.

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 short product name stretched across a whole window.

Bali’s identity rests on a short, easy name that began on a single product. The company’s own story sets that name against a long institutional history: a Philadelphia lamp maker of 1864, a train-blind supplier in the early twentieth century, the Carey-McFall Venetian blinds of the 1930s, and then the Bali Custom Mini Blind of the 1960s. The brand presents the old company and the newer name as one continuous line, in a page it headlines with American style.

That framing tells a buyer something about how the brand wants to be read. Bali is sold as made-to-measure window coverings, and its site, as archived in May 2026, gives as much room to tools as to products: a product advisor, a visualizer that previews treatments in a photograph of the buyer’s own room, measuring and installation guides, and free swatches. The swatch, more than any logo, is where many customers first meet the brand’s colours and textures.

Bali’s place inside Springs Window Fashions also shapes its identity. It sits alongside Graber, the Middleton company’s founding name, under a corporate owner that has added brands over several decades. Bali’s own pages keep the focus on the product family: blinds, shades, shutters and drapery under one name, from narrow-slat blinds to motorised shades. The Grayling, Michigan wood-blind plant that the company names gives the brand a company-stated place of making for at least part of the range.

For a design guide, Bali shows how a product name can grow into a full category brand while holding on to the story of the company that made it. Compare its Springs Window Fashions sister brand in our Graber brand guidelines and another American blind name in our Levolor brand guidelines. For this guide we use window blue, linen white, hardwood tan and garden sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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