BBSA not comfortable with We Love Exterior Blinds

There is an interesting blog post at We Love Exterior Blinds saying that the BBSA have declined to comment, post, or offer any involvement, and this has stirred up some other comments in reply.

We Love Exterior Blinds is a blog written by Stuart Dantzic of Caribbean Blinds UK Ltd. Despite this, his blog is quite clearly written in an entirely independent and objective manner, with no direct branding, name dropping or pushing of his own company.

We spoke to Stuart about his blog before it was live and suggested that the only way we thought it could work was if he would welcome all points of view – even from competing manufacturers and retailers, as well as feedback from installers and, most importantly, the public. Even if they don't agree with him.

True to his word, this seems to be happening. We have made a few conflicting comments on his blog based on an alternative point of view, which he has welcomed.

We think that the reasons behind the BBSA decision is probably twofold:

They do not differentiate between a blog and a commercial web site and so feel that they cannot be seen to promote it, or prefer one member over another.

We also suspect that there may be a certain element of politics behind this, as the BBSA does sometimes seem to prefer some members over others.

Of course we may be wrong: there may well be other issues behind the scenes that we are not aware of that would change our views, but in some respects this doesn’t matter.

The problem is that the external blind market is mostly made up of completely untrained and inexperienced retailers who are simply trying to make a bit of extra money. Many are selling the cheapest possible awnings imported from the Far East that do not meet the relevant safety standards and are fitted in an unsafe manner. 

We Love Exterior Blinds is an attempt to help educate everyone and hopefully drive out the cowboy element.

That alone should be worthy of support, but the BBSA seem to be missing this opportunity to raise their profile and that of the industry.

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