From scarves woven at home to shade fabric and a dog bed.

Coolaroo is the consumer brand of GALE Pacific, an Australian technical fabrics company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code GAP. The company’s 2023 Annual Report, lodged with the exchange in August 2023, describes it as having been founded in Melbourne in 1951 and says its consumer products are marketed under the Coolaroo® brand. The same report lists those products as outdoor roller shades, shade sails, shade and garden fabrics, shade structures and pet products, and among its consumer product categories it names Pet Beds alongside roller shades, shade sails, pergolas and gazebos, umbrellas and grow bags. Commercial fabrics for farming, building, mining and packaging are sold separately, under the GALE Pacific Commercial® name.

The company’s own milestones begin far from either shade or dogs. According to the annual report, Harry and Barbara Gale established Gale Scarves in Victoria in 1951: Barbara wove products at home, and Harry sold them to local merchants. The company’s website history, which uses slightly different wording, says the couple began with scarves and babywear. In 1974, the annual report says, the Gales experimented with new materials and processes and arrived at a high-density polyethylene shade fabric that did not fray or tear under tension. The website places the launch of a knitted shadecloth called Weathashade in 1976. That polyethylene fabric is the thread that ties the company’s later shade sails and blinds to the Coolaroo dog bed.

A name chosen to gather the retail range together.

The business crossed the Pacific early. The annual report says rising demand for shade fabric led GALE into the United States in 1982, with an office in Orlando, Florida, and that it has served American retailers and distributors since then. The Coolaroo name came later. In the 2023 report’s milestone list, 1996 is the year GALE moved its head office, assembly floor and warehouse to Braeside, Melbourne, and the year “the Coolaroo® brand is born”, with all consumer products consolidated under one brand. The company’s current website history gives a different date for a similar step: it says that in 1998 GALE united its retail products under Coolaroo and expanded into international markets. Both accounts come from the company, and they agree that Coolaroo was created to put the consumer range under a single name.

The listing followed. According to the annual report, GALE Pacific listed on the ASX in 2000, the same year it acquired the coated fabrics business of Visy and established GALE Middle East. In 2005, it says, the company opened a wholly owned manufacturing facility for knitted products in Ningbo, China. The 2023 report refers to GALE’s manufacturing facilities in Ningbo and Braeside, and to production at both sites during that financial year. In March 2023, the report says, the company completed moving its Americas headquarters from Orlando to Charlotte, North Carolina.

The company’s website history fills in the years around the brand’s creation with its own account. It says that during the 1980s and 1990s shade moved from plant nurseries into home backyards, that GALE’s partnership with the Australian hardware retailer Bunnings began in that period, and that the Coolaroo brand was established then. For the 2000s, the same page says the product portfolio diversified and Coolaroo expanded into retail markets around the world. The 2023 annual report adds that GALE employs people based in Australia, China, the United States, Europe and Asia.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make beds for dogs. Dog bed brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from small workshops run by the people who started them to names that now belong to much larger pet companies, textile manufacturers or investment groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialty pet shop to an online marketplace or a hardware store.

A dog bed brand’s identity is usually carried less by one bed than by a name, a mark, its fabrics and colourways and the way its range is described and packaged, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond its first product. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beds are actually designed and made.

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

A shade brand with a dog bed in its catalogue.

Pet beds sit inside Coolaroo rather than beside it. The brand’s Australian website groups them under Pet Products, with separate pages for elevated dog beds, pet bags and replacement covers. In October 2026 its elevated dog bed page listed the Original Elevated Dog Bed in small, medium and large sizes, all in a colour the site calls Brunswick Green. The replacement covers make the idea of the product plain: a fabric bed stretched over a frame, with the fabric as the part that can be changed. In that sense the dog bed uses the same material story as the shade sails and blinds sold under the same name.

The company has kept its pet range in its corporate reporting. Describing its Americas business in the 2023 annual report, GALE said it had won new retail placements in shade sails, fabrics, roller shades, pet beds and commercial fabrics, driven by new product launches featuring Coolaroo® with HeatShield® technology across categories. The report presents Coolaroo as a name sold through major retailers, in stores and online, and the brand’s pages remain organised by product type rather than by animal or by room. GALE Pacific, still based in Braeside, owns the Coolaroo name, and the company traces the brand back to the 1990s consolidation of its retail range.

For a design guide, Coolaroo shows how a consumer name created to gather one company’s shade and garden goods could stretch to a raised dog bed without changing its material or its voice. Compare Petmate, a Texas kennel maker founded as Doskocil Manufacturing, and Ruffwear, a dog-gear brand that also began with fabric. For this guide we use Brunswick green, terracotta and shade sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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