A wet city, an old umbrella shop and a new name.

ShedRain began in Portland, Oregon, in 1947. The company’s own telling starts a year earlier, on a wet winter day in downtown Portland in 1946, when Meyer Blauer saw an opportunity in the rain; in 1947, the company says, he, his brother and two uncles bought a small umbrella repair shop and gave it a new name, Shed Rain.

A fuller account comes from the family itself. In an oral history recorded on 23 June 2005 for the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Stan Blauer, Meyer’s son, said the business started with six staff and a few used sewing machines, and that its early work was repairing discarded umbrellas so they could be sold again. He named the founders as the brothers-in-law Nathan Gold and Barney Liebreich and their nephews, the brothers Meyer and Sol Blauer; the shop had been Carl Steinberg’s, at Fourth and Morrison, and Gold sold his share to the other partners in 1950. The company’s own history captions name Barney LeBreich and the Blauer brothers as its three original founders, so the spelling and the count differ between the two accounts.

The business was first called the Shedrain Umbrella Company and became a corporation in the 1950s, Stan Blauer said. Its first factory was in the Hamilton Building at SW Third and Alder; it moved to SW Second and Main, then in 1962 to SE Union and Main, and in 1994 to NE Killingsworth, near Portland’s airport. In the 1950s, the company says, its first two retail partners were the Portland retailers Charles F. Berg and Meier & Frank, and the parts for its umbrellas came from the eastern United States.

The family stayed in charge. Stan Blauer and his cousin Marvin Liebreich joined full-time in the 1950s, he said in 2005, and a third generation — his sons Jeff and Doug Blauer and Marvin’s son Greg Liebreich — joined in the 1990s. The company’s history page describes Stan Blauer as chairman through the inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Bubbles, wind vents and a Red Dot.

ShedRain’s history page sets out its products decade by decade. In the 1960s, it says, its umbrellas were featured in Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour, and a campaign aimed at men ran in Playboy. In the 1970s it bought an umbrella company in the Midwest, and the clear, domed Bubble umbrella appeared — a shape the company still sells. In the 1990s it turned to fashion umbrellas cut from waterproofed sportswear fabrics and new prints, and made LED “WalkSafe” umbrellas.

From the 2000s the emphasis moved to wind. The company describes the Wind Reflex, an umbrella designed to turn inside out in a gust and then return to shape, and vented canopies on its WindPro and Windjammer models; in the 2010s it introduced the Vortex, which it calls patented wind technology.

The best-documented product is the Stratus. It received a Red Dot Award: Product Design in 2014, according to Red Dot’s own record, which names ShedRain Corporation of Portland as manufacturer and Haythornthwaite Design of Xiamen, China — David and Andrew Haythornthwaite — as designer. The jury singled out a modular system of interchangeable handle parts and mechanisms, and a frame with a three-lobed profile meant to stop the shaft and canopy twisting; ShedRain says the umbrella has more than 250 parts and is assembled by hand.

The company also sells to businesses that put their own logos on umbrellas. In October 2018 PPB Newslink, the trade news service of the promotional-products association PPAI, reported that IMAGEN Brands, the parent of Crown Products and Vitronic, had become the exclusive supplier of ShedRain products to the promotional-products trade, taking over sales, marketing and decorating and shipping from Doniphan, Missouri. Jeff Blauer, quoted as ShedRain’s president, called it “the perfect partnership.”

Who makes the umbrella.

The seven brands in this group are all umbrella names: James Smith & Sons, totes, Knirps, London Undercover, Il Marchesato, GustBuster and ShedRain. Umbrella brands sit at many different points in the trade, from a single London shop to names sold in department stores and supermarkets around the world, and from makers that still sew in their own workrooms to brands whose umbrellas are designed in one country and made in another.

An umbrella brand’s identity is usually carried by a handful of things — a name, a handle, a canopy colour or print, a label sewn into the cover — rather than by any one product, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or moved its production since it began. Some names are very old: James Smith & Sons, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1830, still trades from a Grade II* listed shop on New Oxford Street in London. Others have moved country: the Knirps name, which German Wikipedia traces to Hans Haupt’s folding umbrella of 1928 in Solingen, is now run from Braunau am Inn in Austria.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its umbrellas 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 umbrellas are made and how its products and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in Portland, then made to its designs.

Where ShedRain’s umbrellas are made has changed over time. The company says it has more than fifty years of in-house manufacturing behind it, and that its Portland workrooms grew from a few sewing machines to hundreds. By 2005, Stan Blauer told the oral-history project, production had moved overseas as imports grew: most goods were then made in China by Taiwanese-owned factories, with some handles from Italy, and the Portland staff worked mainly in sales, shipping, warehousing and screen printing.

The family remains in charge. In 2015 Oregon Business named Jeff Blauer as the owner of the Portland-based maker, writing about its colourful Wiz umbrella, and in a release dated 24 March 2026, datelined Portland, the company quoted him as president and chief executive and called itself a fourth-generation, family-owned company founded in 1947. That release launched an Events Collection of umbrellas for weddings and outdoor celebrations, including traditional, Bubble and scalloped Bubble shapes. The company now writes its name in capitals as SHED RAIN, while Red Dot’s record and older trade coverage use the single word ShedRain.

For a design guide, ShedRain shows how a family umbrella business can keep its name and its home city while its making moves elsewhere, and how a single award-winning design can sit alongside everyday stock. Compare Davek, another American umbrella brand built around engineering, Senz, the storm umbrella, and GustBuster and totes in this group. For this guide we use slate, mist and a rain blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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