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The senior design engineers at Allen, Texas-based WeBuildBlinds had spent nearly 18 years searching for the perfect window blinds. Anytime there was a problem or complaint with window coverings – substandard materials, design flaws, warranty issues – they took notes. After all, WeBuildBlinds has a unique business model that focuses on specific inventory, rapid delivery and steep price discounts to give customers exactly what they want in custom blinds, and the company couldn’t take any chances with the product.

When it came to discovering who could provide them with the best materials for the job, those engineers finally found their window of opportunity in China.

“We wanted to make sure we had the right product for our customers, a product that we could all be proud to sell. And after sourcing it in many spots, we decided to go to China at great expense, and obviously at some times great anguish, to try and find the right product,” said WeBuildBlinds CEO Larry Barr. “But we have come back with the specifications that they had built for us that are the best in the business. We decided to bring in the product in its raw form, and custom-make them in our Austin location.”

The efforts of his company’s engineers were combined with those working for one of the largest makers of window treatments in China. The results, says Parr, are faux wood blinds and vertical blinds that can not only take the heat of a Texas summer – by deflecting upholstery-fading UV rays and providing energy-saving insulation – but can also withstand the pounding that comes from daily stresses in a home or apartment. But the lengths that WeBuildBlinds traveled to ensure what its executives believe is the best product on the market is just one cog in a competitive machine that lifts it above others in the same industry.

That’s because the company’s design engineers aren’t the only ones who have been engaging in extensive research over a period of years. Others at WeBuildBlinds have been studying customer buying habits and requests for the past three decades, says Roy Ingram, vice president of sales.

“We’ve worked with some of the most prestigious home builders in the United States for the past 28 to 30 years,” Ingram said. “The search that we conducted led us to conclude that the customer is looking for one product. While they want the real wood in a window treatment product, they really don’t want to have to pay the price, and Lord knows with the economic climate we live in today, any kind of price advantage that we can offer the consumer just goes to help them with their bottom line. So the research we conducted led us to conclude that there are two colors in a two-inch faux wood product that represents somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of the demand that comes from the consumer base.”

Those two colors? Snow white and alabaster white, variations on a theme that just happen to match up with most existing paint trim colors on U.S. homes today, Ingram added.

That research led the company to design a business model that offers consumers 2-inch and 3.5 inch faux wood and vertical blinds, in those two colors, that can be custom-cut to their needs. The company has hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory but no hidden costs, so WeBuildBlinds says it can pass the savings – some of the best in the industry – on to customers and put its focus on getting discount blinds to them as quickly as possible. Customers can order blinds online at www.webuildblinds.com, call 888-804-9347 or can email the company, and WeBuildBlinds strives to ship within 24-48 hours of initial contact.

If customers decide to make a phone call to WeBuildBlinds, they’ll encounter another aspect of the business that Barr believes is another key differentiator for his company: strong customer service. Thanks to an employee stock option plan, all the people who work at the company have a stake in its success – more so than the average employee retirement plan, Barr said.

“They are all owners of our company, and thus has a stake in their performance every day, and how that’s going to turn out to their benefit in the long run,” Barr said. “No question, every time a customer calls in, they are speaking to an owner of that company, and the employees understand that and they strive to do nothing but the very best.”

For more information on WeBuildBlinds, go to www.webuildblinds.com.