DWC Home | Magazine | Back Issues | Nov 2002 | The Slant On Shutters

Square And Plumb
No matter what a shutter is made of, its most important component is its installer.

by Howard Shingle

Which type of shutter is best to sell? Which is most preferred by customers? Which has the fewest problems or the most potential? The answer you hear most often to these questions is, ask the person who installs them.

Nick Christopulos is owner of Window Visions, Wheeling, IL, and a window treatments dealer who sells to both designer and retail customers. For the past several years Christopulos has specialized in installing custom shutters and motorized window treatments. It’s a job he really loves.

“I’ve got this latent carpenter in me,” Christopulos admits. “I truly enjoy doing shutter installations because it requires carpentry skills. It tends to be a little bit more challenging at times, and a little bit more rewarding as well.”

Christopulos started out as a strictly shop-at-home window treatments dealer doing the selling, measuring and installing himself. He turned to shutters because he saw a need he could fill. “When I expanded my product offering to shutters, I saw a need because most designers and dealers had someone to install their everyday window treatments, but these people weren’t qualified to install shutters—nor did they want to consider shutter installation.”

Christopulos started offering measuring and installing services for shutters and saw his business expand almost immediately. Today, his expertise is available to dealers looking for help in installing shutters and motorized treatments.

EXPANDING CUSTOMER BASE
Over recent months, Christopulos has seen the popularity of shutters increase quite a bit—especially in his home turf. “Part of it has to do with wood products, in general, becoming more popular,” he says, “but it’s also the fact that more dealers as well as the box stores are coming in and offering shutters.

“At one point it has been advantageous to everybody that more people are promoting the product—even one of the larger window treatment manufacturers is going to be offering a wood shutter, and that can only help the industry because of the promotion they are going to do with regard to that product and getting the word out to the public.

“The industry is still growing, at least in the Midwest it hasn’t reached the saturation point. What has started to happen is the introduction of lower-quality products and lower pricing, and that tends to be confusing the market a little bit,” Christopulos says. The confusion comes about because consumers see they can get shutters for a relatively small amount of money when what they are actually getting is a sub-par product that is not going to be as good as what they expect, he explains.

Christopulos sells and installs wood, composite and vinyl shutters, and sees many of the non-wood shutters as viable alternatives. “What they are doing, as far as my perception is, is expanding the customer base,” he says.

He offers a case in point: “A couple of years ago I happened to go out on a sales call to a customer who was looking specifically to do top treatments in her living room and dining room. It was a modest home. I walked in not expecting the customer to want to buy custom wood shutters. We were there to look at top treatments.

“During the course of trying to determine the style, I showed her my portfolio and as she looked through it she saw a number of shutter installations. She told me, ‘I’ve always liked these shutters. Can you give me a price on them?’”

Christopulos priced out wood, composite and vinyl shutters for the customer’s two rooms. “After she talked to her husband about it, she called me back and they decided to go with the vinyl shutter,” he says. “I did the installation and they were just thrilled about the way it turned out. I never would have thought I was going to sell this woman shutters, but it worked for her.”

NO APOLOGIES
Which product does Christopulos like best? Well, remember, he’s a latent carpenter. “I like the wood better for several reasons: it’s a lighter product, and we can do wider panels with wood so it really gives you flexibility in terms of the treatments and how they are done on the window. Wood can be cut so you can modify the framing, do special milling when necessary, your color options are whatever you want them to be whether they are stained or painted,” he explains.

Yet, he’s well aware that there is a down side to wood shutters, which includes price. “Before I started to sell shutters—before I felt comfortable measuring and installing shutters—if a client asked me for shutters my first response was, ‘Shutters are great, but I can do a wood blind for you and it will be a third of the cost and it will look just as good.’ I hear this being done all the time with dealers who are not familiar with shutters—they don’t want to lose a sale and they don’t want to make a mistake, because with a shutter you’re making an extremely costly mistake if a mistake is made,” he says.

“The first time I had an opportunity to go through a shutter production facility, I had a mind-changing experience. Prior to that, when I would go out and show customers a shutter and give them a price, I would apologize for the price because they were expensive,” he says. “But after going through a shutter production facility and seeing how much more involved it was producing a shutter than it was producing a blind, I realized that they had to cost more money. From that point I had a shift in my own perception, so when I’d go out and give somebody a quote I had no apologies about it. It was warranted in my mind.

“There’s a certain amount of training that dealers who sell shutters need, and part of that training should be to come down and look at a production facility,” Christopulos advises. “It could only have the same affect on other people as well.”

IT TAKES PLANNING
By far, the biggest obstacles to success in selling shutters are the inconsistency of a home’s windows and communicating with customers. Both of these can be overcome by experience, where most of an installer’s knowledge and expertise comes.

“The biggest part of doing any window treatment, but even more so for shutters because they are so unforgiving, is planning a job,” Christopulos says. “It involves looking at a window and seeing all of the possible obstacles that could come into play in terms of where a panel can fit, how it can fit, taking into consideration that the louvers project out the back of the panel in most cases in addition to in front of the panel, operating the louvers, opening and closing the panels, hinging configurations regardless of if it’s a casement window or a double-hung window.”

As an aside, Christopulos notes that there are few things that will make a customer as angry as having custom shutters installed then finding out their double-hung windows can’t tilt into the room for cleaning.

“I’ve been involved after the fact, where I’ve been asked to come in and help fix a job. The main reason I was there was because it wasn’t planned right. More importantly, the client was not informed about some of the imperfections the installer had to deal with in regard to out-of-square windows, windows that were out of plumb, and windows that had inconsistent depths that would not accommodate an inside-mount.

“It really comes down to being able to look at a window, visualize a shutter in that window and see each of its operations being feasible,” he says.

Another key point is communication with the homeowner. “The old adage ‘It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission’ does not apply in the window treatment industry. You’re giving the consumer the opportunity to negate the entire sale because you did not inform them. At that point, they are going to take the position, ‘Had I known, then I wouldn’t have done this.’ Well, the fact of the matter is 95 percent of the time, had they known, they still would have done it, but they would have had to labor over it for a minute or two and then give you the OK.

“When I’m looking at doing an inside-mount involving shutters I will bring a carpenter’s square into a client’s home and I’ll put it in the window in the corner and I will show her whether her window has a 90-degree angle in that corner. I’ll show her if I put a shutter panel in there how it’s going to fit in and then it will be her option. If there’s a problem there, then we go to Plan B, and there’s always another way to go.

“Any product,” Christopulos reminds us, “is only as good as it is installed. If a shutter is installed properly it looks like it’s part of the window, it becomes a part of the house.”