In the beginning, it was never about money.
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“So I've been in the window and door industry on the manufacturing side for about 22, 23 years now. And my customers had a problem with window screens scratching and denting, and [being] hard to get in and out,” explains Joe.
In his own garage, Joe started working on a solution for customers in the form of a flexible screen. “This was just a hobby,” says Joe. “I pulled my wife's Yukon out of the garage and set up a workbench, and two years later, I had this really ugly prototype that I showed off to some contacts that I had in the industry.”
And that is how the FlexScreen product was born. “FlexScreen is the world's first and only flexible window screen,” says Joe. “We've been producing for about seven years now.”
The road to FlexScreen’s success has been bumpy, but definitely interesting. “We are in the middle of opening up our seventh manufacturing location. So we [have been] growing fast over the past seven years. It's been a wild ride,” Joe says.
If Joe’s name sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen him on TV. The FlexScreen brand gained attention since it was launched — attention that eventually led to Joe’s appearance on Shark Tank in 2020. The road to Shark Tank wasn’t a clear or obvious path, however. “Our first year of sales was $400,000,” Joe explains.
New products are launched in the building materials industry every day, and Beth points out that “many of them just get sucked right into the traditional channels.”
