Milestones Icon: Hunter Douglas

Hunter Douglas’ flagship Window Fashions Division in Broomfield has been producing custom window coverings in North America for a quarter century.

What began in 1986 as a 40,000-square- foot facility on Alter Street sold one product: the Duette honeycomb shade. Since then, the company has managed to grow from a roster of 52 employees to 800 people in a 14.6-acre complex and business park.

The 600,000-square-foot facility produces thousands of custom window fashions each year that are exported to 38 countries around the world.

Hunter Douglas was founded in Germany when Henry Sonnenberg developed a machine tool distribution business. He established a machine tool operation in the Netherlands in 1933, which was moved to the United States in 1940. Six years later, Sonnenberg collaborated with a precision miller for aircraft manufacturers, Joe Hunter, to develop a way to produce lightweight aluminum slats for venetian blinds.

In the 1940s, a German name carried some disadvantages, so Sonnenberg picked the name “Douglas” from a phone book.

Sonnenberg created a network of 1,000 independent fabricators in the United States and Canada who would sell blinds during the day and assemble them at night. The model caught on quickly, and in 1956, the business was sold and concentrated building the window coverings business outside the United States.

From 1960 to 1980, Hunter Douglas operations expanded in Europe, Australia and Latin America and the company went public in 1969.

The company was doing so well it was able to reacquire its former U.S. business in 1976.

The Broomfield operation opened in 1986 to market and develop the Duette honeycomb shade, but expanded to develop many others. By 1989, Duette shades had captured about 60 percent of the pleated-shade market.

The company began introducing fabric shades in the 1990s and PowerRise battery operated remotes.

The Broomfield company began under the direction of Marv Hopkins, who is now president and CEO of Hunter Douglas-North America. He said the division’s development of such product lines as Duette honeycomb shades and Silhouette window shadings “helped propel Hunter Douglas Inc. to the position it enjoys today as the largest and most successful window-covering company in North America.”

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