New System Dresses Windows In Minutes

(Thursday, December 15, 2005) - Victor Yosha is a professional entrepreneur. In 1970, he started American Office Equipment Co. in Denver, sold it in 1984 and left it in 1987, then, with only part-time departures from home, started a Seattle copier distributor in 1988, and sold it in 1994. In 1997, he's into window fashions. Draperies, valances, blinds and shutters, sheers and shades, swags and cascades.

Yosha can pull up all of those items on a computer screen, paste them on a wall that is drawn to the scale of your own living room and its windows, calculate how much fabric or wood you might need for a specific treatment, price it for you exactly, adjust the treatment and then price it again if the first time proved too expensive, then write up a purchase order you can review —all while sitting on your couch, and in as many minutes as it takes to measure windows and walls, and for you to decide what you want.

V2K Window Fashions is a turn-of-the-century way to pick out drapes, and Yosha and Bob and Linnie Leo are already franchising the concept, starting in Denver, but with designers' eyes on the rest of the country as well.

The latest franchise holder is US Home, the state's second-largest homebuilder. It was impressed enough with the V2K software to buy three franchises — at a fee of $13,500 each — with the intention of locating them within three new home-design centers they will roll out in January to help US Home customers design the insides of their homes even before carpenters start framing them.

These franchises aren't like McDonald's restaurants or Great Clips barber shops. Essentially it's a computer with software that does the V2K tricks and calculations, and the right to hook up to the company's distribution system, which will purchase materials for the order and send them back to you for installation.

The franchisee is an in-home sales person who can flip up the screen on his or her laptop and show customers what their windows will look like with the choices they've made. The aspect that makes their sales presentation unique in the nation is the ability to calculate prices based on measured volume of materials within minutes.

"I haven't heard of that," said Mary Frye, executive director of Home Furnishings International, a Dallas-based trade association with 1,600 members across the country. Frye said on Thursday that she had just returned from a trade show where presenters raised the prospect of "virtual" consumer buying becoming so widespread that regular retail outs, including super stores and department store chains, may have to change the way they now operate.

Already in Denver, Sears is ready to convert the vacant Incredible Universe store near Park Meadows into a home products center where you'll be able to see what a certain rug fabric and lounge chair will look like inside a "virtual" room created from your own home's specific dimensions.

"They won't have anything for window fashions," said Yosha, who is confident that his software product, which eventually will include fabric choices, hasn't yet been duplicated in the window dressing industry. A local spokes woman for Sears confirmed that the computer capabilities of the new Sears store will be geared toward showing how Sears' stock items fit into a room, rather than toward customized decorating.

According to the National Decorating Products Association, sales of drapery and window coverings hit more than $5.3 billion in 1994, even before the national economy took off and helped boost Colorado's new-home market to its current $3 billion a year.

Yosha and the Leos started selling their franchised computer packages in April, and have sold 12, counting the three that are going to US Home. One franchisee, Bebe Fox, admits she's still learning the machine as well as the drapery sales business. But another, Rand Anderson, said he's already generating about four to five jobs a week at an average $2,500 per sale in his fourth month of using the machine.

Window treatments, if you're imagining one now, can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, but part of Yosha's sales pitch is that his company can bring affordable, custom-designed fabric window coverings back to homes that increasingly have switched to cheaper blinds and shutters. And instead of imagining and hoping what the swaths of cloth will look like — until the workmen are walking gout the door, and the stuff is screwed to the window frame — you get an early peek at both the view and the price tag.

View all V2K, The Virtual Window Fashion Store Press Releases

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