Patio Umbrella Land – the blog

When we started this project, we had a plan to create the largest patio umbrella store online, with the most products, the most choices, and the largest selection of Sunbrella fabrics available on the net.  Well, I’m happy to say we’re doing just that, and then some.

100% solution dyed acrylic is hands down the best fabric for outdoor umbrellas of all kinds.  The have a great feel, what in the industry is called “hand”, have exceptional UV protection properties (Sunbrella Acrylics are recommended by the Skin Cancer Foundation) and are exceptionally mildew and stain resistant.  However, we realized that we really need to expand on our fabric selection even more to enhance our offerings.

There is a fantastic, top tier line of acrylic fabrics that performs on the same level as Sunbrella.  We are really glad to be able to bring in the Outdura line of acrylic fabrics on some of our patio umbrellas.  Outdura has been in the fabric industry for a decade, and have produced a beautiful line of acrylic fabrics that provided a lot of value and a lot of quality.

There are other GREAT fabrics out there, such as outdoor olefins and polyester and polyprints, but we’ve decided to only bring the best fabrics to match with the best frames in the industry.

So as of right now, we will have a fantastic line of both Sunbrella and Outdoor outdoor fabrics.

Starting a new business is like riding a roller coaster, you’re excited and terrified at the same time. On some days, news is great! Everything is moving along at a great pace. On other days, the news is horrific. Something just went wrong that’s going to put you back another month. But for the most part, it’s one of the most exciting times in our lives.

Right now, we’re going through fabric choices. We decided from the beginning of this project that we will have the largest choice of fabrics for all of our umbrellas in the industry. Not a small task. Day in and day out is another round of outdoor fabrics coming in swatches, and trying to fit them into our color groupings gets a bit interesting at times. For internal purposes, we’ve grouped by the 4 seasons as well as basic colors. So we have a:

• Spring Group
• Summer Group
• Fall Group
• Winter Group

And for the primaries, we’ve started with:

• Greens
• Blues
• Yellows
• Reds
• Blacks
• Neutrals.

This second group of primary colors is a little subjective. We’re considering adding a brown group because their have been a plethora of great browns and rusts to come out lately, that we’ve had to move them out of the red grouping. Neutrals is pretty much a catch all right now, and we hope to start eliminating those we don’t feel will be the best choices for our customers.

On the design front, we’re incredibly happy with our logo and brand culture. Fine work from the marketing team. We’ve begun the basic layout of our site, and are currently working on the navigation. We believe in a very basic principal in web design, to keep all the major pages within one click. However, that’s proving to be a little difficult in the process. How can you effectively create hundreds of links that will not confuse our customer and cause a problem with the search engines. We’re working on it though, and hope to have a solution this week. Until next time….