Hillarys Brand Guidelines: The Nottingham Blind Maker Built on Home Visits

From one man’s workshop to a national blind maker.

Hillarys is a Nottingham company that makes and sells made-to-measure blinds, shutters, curtains and awnings, most of them sold by advisers who visit customers at home. It dates its start to 1971, the year the Nottingham Post also gave when it reported on the company in July 2017. English Wikipedia says the business was set up by Tony Hillary, who began making blinds in a converted garage at his home in Nottingham and did the advertising, selling, making and fitting himself. At first only Venetian and vertical blinds were offered; roller blinds joined the range in 1974, it says.

The growth story English Wikipedia tells is one of factories and shops. In 1978 production moved into a factory, and shops opened in Nottingham, Leicester, Workington and Spennymoor. A second factory opened in Washington, Tyne and Wear, in 1982 to make blinds for customers in the north of England and Scotland, and a new factory and head office opened in Nottingham in 1985. Through the 1990s the number of outlets rose to 18 and the range widened to Roman, wooden and pleated blinds, the last of these tied to the spread of conservatories. Awnings for the outside of the house were added in 1996.

Ownership changed hands several times before the present owner arrived. English Wikipedia, citing a May 2001 report in Financial News, says the founder sold the company to a management buyout team backed by Close Brothers Private Equity. A second management buyout, backed by Change Capital Partners, followed in 2004, and European Capital became the company’s financial backer in 2007. In the same years the business changed shape: the shops were closed in a programme that began in 2005, interior shutters arrived in 2006, and a specialist division for conservatory blinds, shutters and awnings was set up in 2007. A production site in the Bilborough area of Nottingham opened in 2008, and curtains returned to the range from 2010, first in Nottinghamshire and then further afield.

The company also crossed the Irish Sea early. Hillarys says its small team began visiting customers in Dublin in 1984 and that it now has more than 70 people in Ireland, backed by a contact centre covering the whole country.

Advisers, swatch books and three factories.

The Hillarys brand is built around a visit rather than a shop window. In its 2017 review of the Hunter Douglas deal, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) described Hillarys as a UK-based supplier of window coverings, awnings and flooring with a national network of sales representatives who visit customers at home under the Hillarys name. The CMA noted that, across the market, about 70 per cent of made-to-measure blind sales and around 90 per cent of shutter sales involve the retailer visiting the customer to measure and quote, so the customer’s choice is between retailers willing to come to the house. Retailers in this channel, it explained, carry product books and samples from which the customer chooses before the blind is ordered to size.

The Nottingham Post reported in July 2017 that Hillarys sold through an in-home sales and installation service run by a network of more than 1,000 self-employed advisers, who sell and fit its core and specialist products. The same report listed the rest of the group’s brands: Arena and Custom West, which sold to the trade, and the e-commerce brand Web-Blinds. The CMA described Custom West as Hillarys’ wholesale shutters unit and noted that third-party retailers it asked saw Hillarys as the market leader in selling shutters in the home. It also found that Hillarys was self-supplied, making what its advisers sell.

That making happens in the English Midlands and the north-east. The Nottingham Post counted three sites in 2017: the head office on the Colwick industrial estate in Nottingham, a site on Glaisdale Parkway in Bilborough, also in Nottingham, and a plant in Washington, Tyne and Wear. The paper said Hillarys had recently added carpets and flooring to the blinds, curtains, shutters and awnings it already sold.

The range itself is broad. The CMA contrasted Hillarys with Thomas Sanderson, the home-visit brand already owned by Hunter Douglas, noting that Thomas Sanderson did not supply roller blinds, wooden Venetian blinds, vertical blinds or Roman blinds, while Hillarys sold significant quantities of each. Hillarys also says it has worked on exclusive collections with names from interiors publishing and design, among them House Beautiful, the designer Abigail Ahern and the studio Poodle & Blonde.

How the category presents itself.

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 Hunter Douglas company since 2017.

The current owner arrived in 2017. Retail Gazette reported on 12 May 2017 that Hillarys had been sold to the Dutch window-coverings group Hunter Douglas by its previous owner, Ares Capital Corporation, and that it would continue to trade as a standalone company with its senior management unchanged. The Nottingham Post repeated those points in July 2017, adding that the business would keep running from its Colwick headquarters and that Hillarys’ parent company was Bellotto Holdings.

The CMA then examined the deal. Its decision records that Hunter Douglas UK completed the purchase of Bellotto Holdings on 17 July 2017, and on the same day the authority served an initial enforcement order on Hunter Douglas. The CMA cleared the merger at its first phase on 5 December 2017, finding that the two sides were not each other’s closest competitors in any of the markets it looked at and that many other suppliers remained. In a later inquiry the CMA noted that Web-Blinds had since been folded into Blinds2go, Hunter Douglas’s online blinds retailer.

Hunter Douglas itself has changed hands since. English Wikipedia says the group, headquartered in Rotterdam with a management office in Lucerne, became 75 per cent owned by the investment firm 3G Capital in February 2022, with the Sonnenberg family keeping the remaining quarter.

For a design guide, Hillarys shows how a blind maker can build a brand around a person at the door rather than a store front, with sample books and a measuring tape doing the work a shop window would. Compare Hunter Douglas, its owner since 2017, and Blinds2go, the group’s online counterpart. For this guide we use slate, linen and a dusty rose with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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