Local Budget Blinds wins two company-wide awards

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This article was published 01/02/2020 (2115 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The owners of Budget Blinds of Southwestern Manitoba went up a mountain and came down award-winners.

Sue and Gord Swarbrick recently went to the company’s international annual conference in Denver, Colo. Sue told the Sun that the approximately 1,100 franchise owners with the company attend the event

“It’s a weeklong convention that revolves around new products, learning, gatherings,” Sue said. “We go every year; we’ve never missed.”

They were awarded two awards while there for their ninth straight convention: a first-place award in the combination treatments for drape designs within Budget Blinds and a Lutron Brilliance award.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” Sue said about winning the awards. “Usually we’re in the top-ten percentile of our peers. That’s a pretty big deal in rural Manitoba; we’re competing against New York and Chicago.”

The combination treatments prize was awarded for Budget Blinds’ work on a house just outside Brandon. They installed a combination of shades and drapes with smart controls for a customer.

“Our design competitions are based on soft fashions, top treatments, commercial jobs,” Sue said. “This was what they call combination where we use hard goods in the window and soft fashions combined.”

Lutron was founded by Joel S. Spira, who invented the dimmer switch in 1959. They partner with Budget Blinds to award franchisees who best utilize Lutron shader and dimmer technologies in combination with electronic assistants.

“On that (same) job, we had 10 automated shades in that home that all move at the touch of a button or voice command,” Sue said. “They can set scenes in their home (like) where when they walk out of their bedroom, all the shades move. You can put timers on them, you can geofence them, you can make them go up and down during certain times of the day.”

She added that in her field of work, the real progress being made is in refining and improving automation. According to Sue, it also improves child safety by not having cords dangling from blinds or drapes.

“For a long time we were really content with cordless mechanisms for child safety and now they’re all automatic,” Sue said. “It’s even better.”

At first, customers weren’t buying into automation but she said that they’ve come around.

“When we started selling automation, a lot of people said ‘oh we don’t need it, we can get up off the sofa’,” Sue said. “But it allows for consistency in taking them up and down. They’re just better than they used to me.”

These awards were the local franchisee’s first-ever design awards. Previously, they won awards for rookie of the year, brand ambassador and a heart and home award for giving back to the community.

Budget Blinds of Southwestern Manitoba serves the area from the border with Saskatchewan to Portage la Prairie going east to west and from Wasagaming to the United States border going north to south.

 

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