Hardware first, then the blinds themselves.

Levolor grew out of the work of Hans Knudsen Lorentzen, known inside the company as “H. K.”. His obituary in The New York Times, published on 18 January 1974, says he served an apprenticeship as a tool and die maker in his native Denmark, came to the United States in 1911, and founded H. K. Lorentzen, Inc., which became Levolor Lorentzen, Inc., of Hoboken, New Jersey. The newspaper described him as a pioneer in the manufacture of venetian blinds in the country.

A longer New York Times article by Alison Leigh Cowan, published on 15 May 1988, filled in how the business moved towards the window. It says Lorentzen started out as a die maker, then made hardware for window blinds, and eventually made the blinds themselves.

The same article explains the name. According to the 1988 report, Levolor derives from a Lorentzen levelling device that allowed blinds to rise and fall evenly. The brand name is therefore a contraction of a mechanical idea rather than a family name, even though the company carried Lorentzen’s name for decades as Levolor Lorentzen.

The founding date is given in two ways. Levolor’s own website in 2014, as archived by the Internet Archive, said the company was founded in 1914, and English Wikipedia gives 1914 and Hoboken as its founding year and place. When Hunter Douglas announced its agreement to buy the business in 2016, Consumer Goods Technology reported the company as “founded in 1935”. This guide follows the company’s own 1914 date.

From a family company to Newell, then to Hunter Douglas.

Levolor stayed in the Lorentzen family for decades. By 1988, The New York Times reported, Levolor Lorentzen was based in Parsippany, New Jersey, and had hired an investment bank to look for buyers. The same article quoted the president of Hunter Douglas’s North American operations, which the newspaper described as a significant rival.

The next documented owner was Newell. On 7 April 1993, The New York Times reported that the Newell Company of Freeport, Illinois, had signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Levolor Corporation, then of Sunnyvale, California. The newspaper described Levolor as a company that made, marketed and distributed decorative window coverings, including horizontal and vertical blinds, and Newell as a maker of consumer hardware, housewares and office products.

Under Newell, which later became Newell Rubbermaid, Levolor became one of a portfolio of household brands. Its website in 2014 said that Levolor was a division of Newell Rubbermaid and was located in Atlanta, Georgia. The same page said Levolor was “synonymous with the 1” mini-blind” and listed vertical, aluminium and wood blinds, cellular and woven wood shades and sheer vertical treatments, together with decorative drapery hardware sold through home centres and other retailers.

The brand changed hands again in 2016. On 28 March 2016, Consumer Goods Technology reported that Hunter Douglas had agreed to acquire the Levolor and Kirsch window-covering and drapery-hardware business from Newell Rubbermaid. The report set out how the two brands were expected to fit together: Hunter Douglas sold premium custom coverings mainly through specialty dealers, while Levolor was distributed primarily through the home-centre channel. English Wikipedia says the sale completed in July 2016. Hunter Douglas has owned Levolor since 2016.

At the time of that agreement the report gave Levolor’s base as Atlanta, with manufacturing facilities in Ogden, Utah, Agua Prieta, Mexico and Shenzhen, China, and a customer service centre in High Point, North Carolina. English Wikipedia describes the present company as a maker of custom and stock blinds and shades headquartered in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

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 mechanical name that became a household word for blinds.

Levolor’s identity begins with its name. Where many household brands carry a founder’s surname, Levolor, according to The New York Times in 1988, was coined from a levelling device that made a blind rise and fall evenly. It is a name about function, and it suits a business that started in tool and die work and moved, step by step, from blind hardware to complete blinds.

The brand’s later positioning was about reach rather than craft. By the time Newell Rubbermaid owned it, Levolor’s own website described a broad range — metal, wood and vinyl blinds, cellular and woven shades, verticals and drapery hardware — sold through home centres and other retailers, and it tied the brand to the one-inch mini-blind. When Hunter Douglas agreed to buy it in 2016, the trade report framed Levolor as the home-centre counterpart to Hunter Douglas’s own dealer-sold brand.

Ownership has moved from a New Jersey family company to Newell, which agreed to buy it in 1993, and then to Hunter Douglas, which completed its purchase in July 2016. The brand now sits within a group that also owns the Hunter Douglas and Luxaflex names — the company whose North American president The New York Times quoted as a rival in 1988.

For a design guide, Levolor shows how a coined, mechanical name and a clear retail channel can keep a brand recognisable through several changes of owner. Compare its parent company in our Hunter Douglas brand guidelines and a motorised shade from a lighting-control company in our Lutron Serena brand guidelines. For this guide we use brick red, aluminium, steel grey and slat white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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