Most window covering dealers who go out of business were profitable on paper right up until they weren’t. They quoted work, won it, installed it well, and still ran short of cash — because the number they called margin was actually markup, and the gap between the two was quietly eating the overhead they forgot to price in.
This is a guide to how to price custom blinds and shades as a business rather than a hobby: the arithmetic that separates markup from margin, a formula that recovers overhead instead of hoping it disappears, and the five places profit leaks out of an otherwise healthy job. Every number below is arithmetic you can reproduce with a calculator. None of it is a recommended price — that decision is yours, and it should be.
Markup vs. Margin: The Mistake That Bankrupts Dealers
Markup is what you add to your cost. Margin is what you keep out of the sale. They use different bases, and confusing them overstates your profit on every job.
Take a shade that costs you $100 landed. Add 50% markup and you sell it for $150. Your gross profit is $50 — but that $50 is 33.3% of the $150 you collected, not 50%. If your business plan assumed 50% margin, you just funded your overhead with a third less money than you budgeted.
The conversion runs one way only: margin = markup ÷ (1 + markup).
| Markup on cost | Resulting gross margin |
|---|---|
| 25% | 20.0% |
| 30% | 23.1% |
| 40% | 28.6% |
| 50% | 33.3% |
| 60% | 37.5% |
| 75% | 42.9% |
| 100% | 50.0% |
| 150% | 60.0% |
| 200% | 66.7% |
Read it backwards and the lesson lands harder. To hold a 40% gross margin you need roughly 67% markup. To hold 50% margin you need to double your cost. A dealer who has been “marking everything up 50%” and wondering why the year came up short now knows why.
Pick one language — quotes, bookkeeping, supplier conversations — and use it everywhere. Mixing them is how a business ends up running on numbers that were never true.
How to Price Custom Blinds: The Formula Underneath Every Quote
A defensible price has four components, and only the first one shows up on your supplier invoice:
- Cost of goods — the product landed at your door, including freight, duty and any packaging you throw away
- Direct labour — the measure visit, the install, the drive time, the return trip nobody planned for
- Overhead recovery — your share of rent, vehicle, insurance, software, samples, advertising and the hours you spend quoting work you don’t win
- Target profit — what the business earns after all of the above is paid
Work it as a division, not an addition. If you know your target gross margin, then price = (cost of goods + direct labour) ÷ (1 − target margin). A job with $1,000 of product and labour priced to a 40% margin sells for $1,000 ÷ 0.60 = $1,667. Priced to 35%, the same job sells for $1,538. The formula never argues with you; it just tells you what the margin you claim to want actually costs the client.
Your overhead recovery rate is the one input you cannot borrow from anyone else. Take last year’s total operating expenses — everything that isn’t product cost or install labour — and divide by the number of jobs you completed. That is what every job has to carry before you have earned a dollar. Dealers who skip this step aren’t pricing; they’re guessing with extra steps. Once you have the rate, you can quote jobs in the dealer portal with a cost base you trust, because the specification and the product cost stop being the variable.
Pricing installation labour
Charge from your loaded hourly cost, not your wage. Add payroll burden, vehicle, fuel, tools, insurance and — critically — the hours that are paid but not billable. An installer on the road eight hours a day rarely bills eight; if half the day is drive time, warehouse time and callbacks, your true hourly cost is roughly double what the payroll line suggests.
Then decide whether you bill by the hour or by the shade. Per-shade pricing is faster to quote and easier to compare, but it punishes you on the awkward jobs — high ladders, deep reveals, mullion-mount hardware, no parking. Per-hour pricing protects you and unsettles clients. Most dealers land on a per-shade rate with named exceptions written into the quote.
Pricing the measure visit
The measure visit is where dealers give away the most money without noticing, because it feels like sales. It isn’t — it is technical work whose accuracy determines whether the job is profitable, and it takes a professional’s time.
Three models are defensible: give the measure away as a cost of sale; charge for it and credit the fee against the order; or charge outright as a paid service, which commercial work usually expects. What is not defensible is free measures on jobs of any size, at any distance, for anyone who calls. Set a threshold — job value, travel distance, or both — and hold it.
Residential vs. Commercial: Two Different Pricing Problems
Residential jobs are priced on the product and the visit. Commercial jobs are priced on the product, the visit, and everything the general contractor’s schedule does to you afterwards.
Volume discounting on commercial work only makes sense if the volume actually reduces your cost to serve — one site, one delivery, repeated openings, the same hardware throughout. Fifty identical shades in one tower is a genuinely cheaper job per unit. Fifty different shades across twelve suites is a residential job wearing a commercial suit, and pricing it like a bulk order will cost you.
Three things belong in commercial pricing that residential pricing can ignore. Spec work — submittals, samples and revisions before anyone signs — is real labour and should be priced or scoped. Payment terms stretch, so the money you float between paying your supplier and getting paid has a cost. And holdback provisions withhold part of your invoice until the project’s lien period closes, which is a cash-flow event even on a profitable job.
The hardest discipline is walking away. A commercial job priced to residential margins with commercial payment terms is a loan you are making to a stranger. If the site conditions, the schedule risk or the terms don’t support the price, the correct quote is no quote.
Promotional Pricing Without Destroying Margin
Discounting feels like a volume decision. It is a margin decision, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. To hold the same gross profit after a discount, the extra volume you need is: original margin ÷ (original margin − discount).
| Your gross margin | Discount off price | Extra volume needed to break even |
|---|---|---|
| 30% | 5% | +20% |
| 30% | 10% | +50% |
| 40% | 5% | +14% |
| 40% | 10% | +33% |
| 40% | 15% | +60% |
| 50% | 10% | +25% |
| 50% | 20% | +67% |
A “10% off” promotion at a 40% margin has to bring in a third more work just to stand still. Few promotions do.
Structure beats discounting. Build good-better-best fabric tiers so the client chooses upward instead of negotiating downward — an entry fabric that is genuinely fine, a mid tier where most orders land, and a premium tier that makes the mid tier look sensible. The premium tier earns its keep even when nobody buys it, because it anchors the comparison.
Motorization is the upgrade most worth testing against your own numbers, and the test is simple: take your motor and control cost, add the extra install and programming minutes per opening, price the result at your target margin, and compare it with the manual quote. Do it with current costs rather than the add-on figure you set two years ago. Sun Glow dealers can specify Somfy motorization or Stealth motorization depending on the system the project calls for.
The Profit Leaks
Most lost profit doesn’t leave through the price. It leaves after the quote is accepted.
Remakes from mis-measures. This is the expensive one, because you pay the product cost twice and the labour twice while collecting once. In gross-profit terms, one remake wipes out the profit from (1 − margin) ÷ margin similar jobs.
| Your gross margin | Jobs of equal size needed to absorb one remake’s product cost |
|---|---|
| 30% | 2.3 jobs |
| 40% | 1.5 jobs |
| 50% | 1.0 job |
| 60% | 0.7 jobs |
That table assumes you absorb only the product cost; add the return install and the number gets worse. It is also why remake policy and remake turnaround belong in the conversation with your supplier before you place your first order — ask for both in writing, along with what a mis-measure on your side actually costs you.
Free service calls. A chain that came off its bracket a year after install is a warranty question or a paid visit — decide which, in writing, in your quote. “We’ll take care of it” is a policy that scales badly.
Unpriced upgrades. Cassettes, side channels, mullion mounts, non-standard hardware, extended brackets. Each one is a line item somewhere in your supplier’s price list and should be a line item in your quote.
Small jobs at full service. Two shades across town costs nearly what eight shades across town costs in drive time and admin. Set a minimum job value, a travel surcharge, or both.
Quoting time. Every hour rebuilding a quote by hand is cost of sale you have to recover from the jobs you win. The Sun Glow dealer portal includes a built-in quoting tool with automatic specification checking, which is the point of quoting in a system that already knows the product rather than in a spreadsheet that doesn’t.
What a Quote Should Show Before You Send It
You cannot manage margin you cannot see. Before a quote leaves your desk, it should carry — internally, not necessarily on the client’s copy — a line for product cost, freight, install labour at your loaded rate, measure time, hardware and upgrades, and the overhead recovery amount for that job. Subtract the total from the price and you have the gross profit in dollars. Divide it by the price and you have the margin.
Do that on every quote for a month and the pattern appears fast: the job types that carry your business, the ones that only look busy, and the client behaviour that moves work from the first group to the second.
Pricing only works with the right cost base underneath it. Apply for Sun Glow dealer pricing and see what Toronto-made custom product does to your margins.
Why You Won’t Find a Recommended Markup Here
A manufacturer publishing the markup its dealers should charge is a manufacturer telling independent businesses how to price against each other. We don’t do that, and no dealer should want a supplier who does. Your cost base, your market, your overhead and your service model are yours; the arithmetic above works at any margin you choose to run.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average markup on custom blinds?
There is no reliable published average, and a single figure would mislead anyway — a showroom dealer with staff and a lease and a solo installer in a van recover completely different overhead. Work it from your own costs using the formula above.
How much should I charge to install blinds?
Start from your loaded hourly cost — wage plus burden, vehicle, tools, insurance, and the unbillable hours in a working day — then convert that to a per-shade rate for standard conditions. Write named exceptions into the quote for the conditions that blow up install time: high ladder work, deep or out-of-square reveals, non-standard mounting and difficult site access.
Should measuring quotes be free?
Only where the job value and the travel justify it. Free measures are recovered from the jobs you win — so every free measure on a job you lose is paid for by a client who said yes. Credit-against-order is the middle path most dealers can defend to a homeowner; paid measures are normal on commercial work.
How do dealers price motorized blinds?
The same way as manual product: motor and control cost into cost of goods, the additional install and programming minutes into direct labour, then price the whole thing to your target margin. The mistake is pricing motorization as a flat add-on that was set years ago and never revisited against current motor costs or install times.
What margin do window treatment dealers need to survive?
Enough to cover overhead recovery per job plus target profit — which is a number only your own books can produce. Calculate operating expenses ÷ jobs completed, add what the business needs to earn, and price to that. A margin that covers overhead in a busy quarter and not a slow one is not a margin, it’s a bet.
Getting the Cost Base Right
Pricing discipline only pays off if the cost side is solid. If you are still choosing a supply model, that decision changes every number here — the comparison is in wholesale custom blinds vs. big-box supply. If you are earlier than that, start with what the dealership takes to set up: become a Sun Glow dealer.
