How to Price Blinds and Curtains Without Underselling Yourself

Most blind and curtain businesses charge less than they should. Not because they want to — because their pricing process makes it impossible to be consistent.

You’ve done the measure-up. You know what products the customer wants. You’ve got a rough number in your head. But then you sit down to build the quote and something quietly goes wrong.

Maybe you forget to add the installation charge. Maybe you pull last year’s supplier price list instead of the current one. Maybe you’re tired and you round down on the markup because you just want to send the quote and move on. Maybe you underprice a complicated double-roller job because calculating it manually is too painful.

None of these are business decisions. They’re pricing errors. And over a year, they add up to a lot of margin quietly walking out the door.

Why Underpricing Happens in the First Place

The root cause is almost never greed or desperation. It’s process. When pricing is manual — spreadsheets, PDFs, handwritten notes, memory — there’s no guardrail. Every quote is a judgement call made under time pressure. And when people make judgement calls under pressure, they consistently err on the side of the number that’s easiest to defend to the customer, not the one that’s right for the business.

There’s also a psychological element. When you’re standing in front of a customer who just told you their budget, it’s tempting to mentally work backwards from what they want to spend rather than forwards from what the job actually costs. That’s a trap that’s impossible to avoid when pricing exists only in your head.

The Markup Consistency Problem

Ask most blind business owners what their markup is and they’ll give you a number. Ask them whether that markup is applied consistently across every product, every job, every sales rep, and the answer gets more complicated.

In practice, markup tends to drift. A rep on a big job rounds down to win it. A one-off curtain job gets a different margin than a full-house blind package. A motorisation add-on gets forgotten entirely. Products that are harder to price — complex fabrications, unusual sizes, premium fabrics — often end up at lower margins than simpler jobs because the effort of calculating them manually leads to conservative rounding.

What a Good Pricing Structure Looks Like

A solid pricing structure for a blind and curtain business has four layers:

The Real-World Cost of Getting This Wrong

Consider a business doing 15 jobs a week with an average job value of $2,000. If pricing inconsistency, forgotten charges and outdated supplier costs shave even 5% off average margin across those jobs, that’s $1,500 a week in lost revenue — more than $75,000 a year.

That’s not money being stolen. It’s money being left on the table because there’s no system to capture it consistently. And because it disappears in small amounts across hundreds of individual quotes, it’s almost invisible until you sit down and look at your annual figures and wonder why profit doesn’t match turnover.

Getting the Structure Right

The businesses in this industry with the healthiest margins aren’t necessarily the ones charging the most. They’re the ones charging consistently. Their pricing doesn’t depend on who’s doing the quote or how much time they have. It comes out the same way every time because the system produces the number — not the person.

If you want to stop underselling yourself, the answer isn’t to be tougher in negotiations or to add 10% to everything. The answer is to build a pricing structure that makes the right number the default — and requires a deliberate decision to change it.