The window and door market changes faster than most builders expect, and the shifts show up in purchase data before they show up on job sites. About 75 percent of replacement exterior doors and patio doors are now bought from home improvement warehouse stores, while less than half of replacement windows move through the same […]
Home improvement spending grew more than 3 percent in 2020 to nearly $420 billion and kept climbing through 2021, and windows and patio doors captured a share of that wave. Unlike a paint refresh or a landscaping project, window and patio door sales usually begin with an in-home consultation, where an expert walks the homeowner
Choosing an entry door used to mean flipping through a printed catalog and hoping the photograph matched the product stacked in the warehouse. The old route meant visits to multiple showrooms, phone calls to distributors, and a leap of faith that the door on the truck matched the one in the brochure. Interactive selection tools
Builders hardware is the quiet backbone of every building. Door knobs and levers, hinges, cabinet pulls, and latches get touched hundreds of times a day, yet they are usually specified last and noticed only when they fail. The category has grown well beyond the basic passage set, and independent dealers that stock it well have
Windows and doors were among the last major building products to move online. A national manufacturer with more than 200 retail showrooms changed that by starting direct online sales of replacement windows and patio doors, letting homeowners customize options, view prices, and check out without visiting a store. The company’s own survey found that 47
Glass walls have moved from commercial storefronts into residential design. Aluminum window and patio door systems with ultra-thin frames and large expanses of glass now connect rooms to views, and many products are engineered to join with one another so that windows, doors, and fixed panels combine into a continuous wall of glass. Wall-to-wall sliding
Consolidation in the fence, gate, railing, and patio hardware market keeps changing what builders can specify. Manufacturers that once specialized in a single product now bundle keyless locks, hydraulic gate closing hardware, and panic hardware into one catalog, and the buying decision shifts from picking a brand to matching a product category to the building.
An entry door does more than close an opening. It sets the tone for the whole house, carries the brunt of weather exposure, and has to open and close smoothly for decades. Manufacturers now treat entry doors as systems: a door leaf combined with sidelites and transoms, engineered as a unit rather than a single
Blinds between the glass place adjustable louvers inside a sealed insulated glass unit, sandwiched between two panes of glass instead of hanging on the room side of the window. The design keeps dust off the slats, eliminates dangling cords, and protects the mechanism from damage. Manufacturers now offer the concept across gliding and hinged patio
When a window manufacturer adds 275,000 square feet of manufacturing space to an existing 1.1 million square foot footprint, production capacity grows by about 25 percent in a single step. That kind of expansion does not just mean more floor space. It changes how a company schedules production runs, manages inventory, and quotes lead times
