Custom window coverings made close to home, and fast.

Next Day Blinds was a regional window-covering company based in Jessup, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore. The company’s own account dated its start to 1993. On an “About Our Name” page preserved by the Internet Archive from around 2010, Next Day Blinds said it had started the business that year to bring consumers in the Washington–Baltimore area fully custom blinds and shades in a day rather than in weeks.

The name was the whole proposition. The same page explained that blinds or shades ordered in one of its stores or online would be manufactured and delivered to the store, or shipped to the customer, in one business day, subject to material availability, weather and other factors outside its control. It set out cut-off times by weekday for store pick-up and for orders shipped to customers, so that the promise in the name could be read as a schedule.

That speed depended on making the product locally. The company described what it called an integrated sales and manufacturing model: the business that sold the blind was also the business that cut and assembled it. As it grew, the company said, it added its own team for professional measuring and installation, and it was frank that the full measured-and-installed service took longer than next-day pick-up. Next Day Blinds said that for good reason it kept the name anyway, and that, just as it offered more than blinds, it did more than next-day delivery.

Later descriptions kept the same shape. An author note on the company’s blog in 2018 described Next Day Blinds as founded in 1993 and as a fully integrated, full-service custom window covering company located in Jessup, Maryland. It listed the stages it handled itself: sales and design, manufacturing, measuring, installation and service. In October 2018 the same blog posted photographs from the company’s celebration of Manufacturing Day, the annual event held on the first Friday in October to mark modern manufacturing.

Showrooms, a catalogue and a range from rollers to shutters.

The range covered most of what a house needs at the window. The company’s website around 2010 listed shades — honeycomb, pleated, roller, natural and soft Roman shades and shadings — alongside blinds in wood, aluminium and vertical styles, shutters in wood and vinyl, and panel tracks and cornices. Customers could order free swatches and request a printed catalogue, and the site carried measuring tips, installation instructions, a stacking chart and a glossary for those fitting their own blinds.

It sold in three ways, which the site set out under the heading of how to shop: by visiting a showroom, by booking a consultation to shop at home, or by ordering online. Its header carried the line “Exactly Right.”, which put the stress on fit as much as on speed. That pairing — measured precisely, made quickly — was the core of how the company presented itself.

The showrooms made the brand visible across the region. ARLnow, the Arlington, Virginia news site, described Next Day Blinds in June 2020 as a regional window covering chain with a showroom in the Virginia Square area of Arlington, and said the company had been a prolific local television advertiser.

The same ARLnow report, published on 16 June 2020, said the company had reportedly gone out of business. Visitors to its website were being redirected to 3 Day Blinds, which ARLnow described as a California company, and the redirected page carried a notice that Next Day Blinds had ceased operations and permanently closed its doors. The notice said that 3 Day Blinds had hired a number of former Next Day Blinds sales staff, design consultants, installers and administrative personnel, and that it would try to continue serving the greater Baltimore and Washington area.

ARLnow reported that no reason for the closure was given. It noted that the last post on the company’s Facebook page, from early April 2020, had said Next Day Blinds was temporarily closed during the pandemic. Archived copies show that the old web address continued to send visitors to a 3 Day Blinds page addressed to former Next Day Blinds customers, which invited them to contact 3 Day Blinds for help.

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 brand built on a timetable.

Next Day Blinds’ identity was carried, above all, by its name. It led with a delivery time rather than a family name or a material. The name told a customer what the company did differently before any showroom visit or catalogue page, and the company’s own explanation of it was a timetable of order cut-offs rather than a slogan.

The line “Exactly Right.” added the second half of the promise. Custom blinds and shades only work when they fit the window, and the company’s account of itself joined speed to precision through local making: manufacturing in Jessup, its own measuring and installation crews, and showrooms across the region. In its own words, it handled sales, design, manufacturing, measuring, installation and service itself.

Its ending is part of the record too. ARLnow reported in June 2020 that the company had ceased operations, and the web address that once carried the next-day promise has since pointed to 3 Day Blinds, which said it had taken on some of the former staff.

For a design guide, Next Day Blinds shows how a service promise can become a brand name, and how much of that name’s meaning rests on the local plant and people that make the promise possible. Compare a motorised shade brand in our Lutron Serena brand guidelines and an American home-organisation retailer in our The Container Store brand guidelines. For this guide we use deep navy, linen, walnut and cord grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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