Conservatory Blinds As Seen on TV

Over the years Conservatory Blinds Ltd has been invited onto many Home Improvement TV Shows, but have only actually been included within two (Home Front and Better Homes with Carol Vorderman). Why?

All of these TV programmes (60 Minute Makeover, Room For Improvement etc.) require the company to provide blinds free of charge within a very short timescale (often within a week or so) and without any specification, requiring multiple visits at short notice and often without showing the blinds at their best.

In many cases the finished property is actually such a low quality that being associated with it is actually a negative.

Having carried out specialist blinds for an episode of Home Front with Diarmuid Gavin and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in 1999 we received just two enquiries, both of which were really not that helpful.

Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes in 2001 was a much nicer experience, but again resulted in very few direct enquiries (4 on this occasion).

Bearing in mind the significant cost to the supplier for being on these shows compared to the absolutely minimal exposure arising from them, the resultant sales are simply not worth it.

Having said that there are two exceptions:

Grand Designs is a very upmarket programme by comparison with the others and does include the opportunity to showcase truly innovative products. The blinds are not provided free of charge, although the customer always negotiates on the bsis that suppliers would have national TV exposure (however minimal). We recently posted an article on this about Caribbean Blinds, but the truth is that unless you do the following, the results are still short lived.

PR associated with being on TV… we have often seen "B List Celebrities" whose only claim to fame is that they were once on TV and then make a career out of this. In terms of blinds we have only seen this done with any result by an individual who bases his “business” almost entirely on the fact that he has been on 60 Minute Makeover and so gives him an air of respectability.

Perhaps we have never made the most of these opportunities or have appeared on the wrong kind of programmes, but our experience has been very negative.

The problem is that TV trivialises what we do. It cannot possibly make conservatory blinds exciting or interesting unless you are making the programme for a very small audience of interested customers and blind specialists, which is hardly the making of a great TV show!

As a result of our bad experiences with TV shows we have subsequently been in a number of high profile magazines and newspapers (just a few examples):

At Home with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
Ideal Home
House Beautiful
Mail on Sunday
Daily Telegraph
Good Housekeeping

We have seen a lot more enquiries and exposure from these sorts of publications,  perhaps because we can somewhat control what is being shown and how our blinds are perceived. We still receive enquiries from articles printed many years ago because people have obviously kept the magazines.

The reason for this news article is because we have yet again been contacted to enquire whether we want to appear in another TV show. And as you can imagine, the answer was a polite no…

Click here to find out more about Conservatory Blinds Limited, or contact us for a free quotation and to see actual blinds in your own home (not just photographs).

We provide the UK’s neatest purpose designed conservatory blinds and professional, helpful advice that you simply won’t receive anywhere else.