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Editorial
A
Billion Dollars and Growing
The shutter market in the United States is growing—it has
been growing and is expected to continuing growing. In fact, it
hasn’t peaked yet. Just about anyone who has been around the
window coverings industry for the past few years would get that
feeling. But is it true? Just how big is it?
This year, in what has become D&WC’s annual Shutter Supplement
(beginning on page 51), we attempted to get right at the heart of
the matter. We asked some of the top shutter manufacturers and suppliers,
“How big is big?”
At first, a couple of the answers we received were a bit astounding:
$750 million a year at the manufacturer’s level, $1 billion
a year at retail. For the bulk of the industry’s 50,000 or
so dealers, whose annual sales are considerably less than that,
those are big numbers. But judging by various other industry estimates
we’ve gotten, they are just about right. Shutters, it has been
said, represent about 14 percent of the total window coverings market,
which has been estimated at between $5.5 billion and $7 billion
dollars. (We tend to agree with the higher end of that range—maybe
higher?) What’s more, in our last Reader Survey on shutters
conducted last year (results reported in D&WC, November 2003,
page 54), the largest percentage of respondents told us the profit
on their custom retail shutter sales is between 31 and 40 percent.
Taken together, these figures point to a healthy market segment.
(There are a few caveats, however, as pointed out in our Shutter
Market Review on page 53.)
Almost as astounding is that every one of the industry representatives
we’ve talked to agree the market still has room to grow. In
a classic case of quid pro quo, as more suppliers enter the market
creating more material and design options for consumers at wider
price points, the more interest and demand for shutters rise, which
leads to more product availability and promotion, and on and on.
If shutters are a billion-dollar market segment this year, how high
will it reach next year, or the year after? It puts me in mind of
the well-known quote attributed to the late Senator Everett Dirksen:
“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to
real money.”
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