Pete and Lucille Kuyper and the Rolscreen Company.

Pella is the brand of Pella Corporation, an American maker of windows and doors based in Pella, Iowa, a town with Dutch roots in the centre of the state. The company did not start out with that name. Its own history says that in 1925 Pete and Lucille Kuyper invested in a new invention, a window screen that rolled up and down like a shade, and set up the Rolscreen Company to make it.

Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories gives the same founders, calling him P.H. “Pete” Kuyper, and the same date of incorporation, 1925, as the Rolscreen Company. It adds that in 1926 the Kuypers moved the company to Pella, their home town, and set up shop there with a workforce of three people headed by Kuyper. Demand for the Rolscreen window screens grew, and Gale says the operation had more than doubled in size by the end of the 1920s.

The product range widened in the following decade. Pella’s timeline says the Rolscreen Company introduced Pella Venetian Blinds in 1934. In 1937 came the window that set its later course: a casement with a steel frame and a wood interior, divided panes, an exterior that could be washed from inside and a removable insulating glass panel. Gale says the casement sold strongly in the late 1930s and that by the mid-1930s Rolscreen had set up sales offices across the United States.

During the Second World War, Gale says, Rolscreen moved from private-sector work to building windows for defence-related construction. After the war it returned with a run of new products, among them the Pella wood folding door of 1952. Through all of this the company still traded as Rolscreen, while its products were increasingly sold under the Pella name.

From Rolscreen to Pella Corporation, still in family hands.

The products that followed built the habits the brand is known for. Pella’s timeline lists roomside removable wood grilles in 1958, wood sliding glass doors in 1960, the Slimshade blinds set between the panes of glass in 1966, and wood windows with aluminium-clad exteriors in 1970. Gale adds a plant in Carroll, Iowa, along with vented skylights and wooden doors. In 1985, the company says, the Pella Window Store opened, a showroom format for selling windows and doors directly. The Architect Series of wood windows and patio doors followed in 1990.

The name caught up with the products in 1992. Gale says the company changed its name from Rolscreen to Pella Corporation that year, and that some Pella executives were introduced that same year to kaizen, a Japanese method of continuous improvement, bringing in the TBM Consulting Group to guide the change. Gale also describes a lower-priced Proline range sold through home centres including The Home Depot.

Acquisitions followed in the late 1990s. According to Gale, Pella bought Cole Sewell Corporation, a storm-door maker in Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1997, Viking Industries, a vinyl-window maker in Portland, Oregon, the next year, and Pease Industries, an entry-door maker in Fairfield, Ohio, in 1999, running all three under their own names as wholly owned subsidiaries. Around 2000, Gale says, Pella made its products at plants in Iowa and at a window plant in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and sold them through Pella Window Stores and Pella Windowscaping Centers.

The ownership has stayed in the family. Gale described Pella Corporation as privately owned by the family of founder Pete Kuyper, and the company’s history page, as archived in April 2026, says Pella Corporation is still owned by the Kuyper family. The product lines on that timeline run on through Impervia fiberglass windows and a vinyl line in 2003, the 350 Series in 2011, the 250 Series in 2014, Scenescape patio doors in 2016, Architect Series Reserve in 2017 and the Lifestyle Series in 2019.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make windows, doors and roof windows: the frames, sashes, panels and glazing that close the openings of a house. Window and door brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that began in a small joinery or a sawmill town to names that now belong to much larger building-materials groups, and a single brand can be sold through dealers, builders, lumber yards and home-improvement chains.

A window or door brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name, a label on the frame and the showroom signs and advertising that go with them, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, merged with a rival or moved its factories over the decades. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its windows and doors 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 marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A town’s name on a window.

Pella’s identity is unusual in that the brand is a place name. The company traded for decades as the Rolscreen Company while selling Pella blinds, Pella windows and Pella doors, and in 1992 it took the town’s name for itself. The original product name did not disappear: the company’s timeline brings Rolscreen back as a retractable screen on a sliding patio door in 2002, on storm doors in 2004 and as the Integrated Rolscreen on double-hung windows in 2018.

The brand has also been shaped by how it is sold. The Pella Window Store, which the company dates to 1985, gave the name its own showroom, and Gale records Pella Windowscaping Centers alongside the stores around 2000, with the Proline range also on home-centre shelves. Advertising aimed the name at a particular kind of house. Gale says Pella began working with the agency Young & Rubicam in the late 1990s, and quotes an interview in Adweek of 20 January 1997 in which Pella’s marketing director, Jerry Dow, said the company was competing with Sub-Zero refrigerators, Jacuzzi tubs and Kohler faucets, not only with other window makers such as Andersen.

Series names do much of the work today. Architect Series, Lifestyle Series and the numbered 250 and 350 Series give the range a clear order, while names such as Slimshade, Impervia, Scenescape and the Vibrancy Collection of entry-door paint colours, introduced in 2016, add character to particular products. Hardware has been part of the vocabulary too: the timeline lists new hardware styles and finishes for wood windows in 2017 and the Easy-Slide Operator for casement and awning windows in 2020.

For a design guide, Pella shows how a company can grow into the name of its home town, keeping its first product name alive as a feature inside the newer brand. Compare it with Andersen, whose family name has stayed on the business since 1903, and Marvin, a family-owned window maker in Minnesota. For this guide we use Rolscreen slate, tulip red and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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