Research Labs Conceal the Sexier (and Nerdier) Side of Doors and Windows
By Drew Vass
Walking through Pella Corp.’s original manufacturing facility is like taking a trip through time. Venturing along the building’s rustic, hardwood floors, under its overhead beams takes one back nearly a century—to 1925, when the company first started. Back, that is, until you reach that one particular door. The one that abruptly transports you into the future.
Not just anyone gets through this door. With high-tech, badged access, Pella’s Innovation Incubator is reserved for select employees. With technologies like robots, laser cutters, CNC machines and 3D printers, engineers and product developers work to succeed—and fail—in fast succession, hoping to create the next big thing in doors and windows.
“My cute way of saying it is—the space is like Santa’s workshop, because people just get to tinker and play and do all of the fun things back there,” says Jenn Tuetken, Pella’s director of innovation, design and brand experience.
What happens in Pella’s lab might stay in Pella’s lab, except that it’s just one of many such facilities throughout the door and window industry. As companies place more emphasis on product development and new ideas, innovation labs are growing in number.
Marvin, Masonite, PGT Innovations (PGTI), Vitro Architectural Glass, Guardian Glass, YKK AP—those are just some of the companies with similar facilities. Quaker Windows & Doors is now working on its own Innovation and Engineering Center. Associated Materials (Alside) announced in April it’s spending $100 million on improvements, including investments at the company’s central facility, which is set to be transformed into a “windows innovation hub.”
Door and window dealers are also getting in on the action.
In recent weeks, West Shore Home opened a new facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, which it dubs the Superior Innovation Center. A “Digital Product Team” of nearly 40 employees in West Shore’s facility specializes in such things as mobile application development, user experience research, user interface design, 3D modeling and virtual and augmented reality.
The same technologies have come into play among labs on the manufacturing side as well.
In July 2023, YKK AP Technologies Lab Inc. opened a new 7,576-square-foot research and development center on the third floor of an old steel mill building. Nearby, Vitro has its Glass Technology Center, which officials say is “one of the world’s most sophisticated glass research, technology, and product development hubs.”
The goal of YKK’s lab is to “improve construction productivity and quality through the research and development of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies,” says Fukada Shiori, chief digital officer, YKK AP Technologies Lab (NA) Inc. Industry outsiders might be inclined to think: “Really? Window companies?”
Window labs are a far cry from Apple Park in Cupertino, California, but their emergence illustrates a commitment to making innovation a priority—including some costly mistakes along the way to the next big thing.
Proof of Concept
So far as what’s come out of the industry’s labs, manufacturers point to an array of firsts as proof of concept. For Pella, that includes such things as fold-away hardware and Impervia, the company’s proprietary composite material.
For Marvin, an example might be the company’s Sky Cove—a structural, garden-style window that adds as much as 20 square feet of space.
In PGTI’s lab, inventors came up with a maglev door. The 700-pound panels and nearly 100 square feet of laminated glass move along at the touch of a finger.
Vitro’s Starphire Ultra-Clear low-iron glass and Solarban 90 glass, the first-ever magnetron sputter vacuum deposition (MSVD) quad-silver-coated low-E glass, both began in its lab, which has so far produced more than 500 patents.
With the ability to prototype and launch production at expedited rates, new products come at a faster pace than they did in years past. Case in point: This year, 90% of what Quaker displayed at the International Builders’ Show didn’t exist just five years ago.
Dedicated labs also serve as fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration—mixing door and window designers with specialists from smart home tech and other industries. Masonite’s M-Pwrd doors are a prominent example. While companies offered individual smart home technologies as upgrades, Masonite paired its door engineers with experts in frame design and connected technologies to produce an entry door system with video doorbells, connected locks, fully integrated power, battery backups and LED welcome lighting—all in a cohesive unit.
With spaces and budgets dedicated to innovation, designers are free to explore such ideas without worrying about failure, says Cory Sorice, Masonite’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer.
“We said, ‘Hey, let’s just get our hands dirty and start prototyping,’” Sorice says. “You can assign a strategic mission, and you’ve got a literal place—a fantastic place for people to do their best work … suddenly you have electrical engineers and software engineers working alongside people who make doors.”
In other cases, spaces are more virtual, or involve numerous departments and facilities, coalescing digitally around the same developments. Marvin’s setup involves a collection of facilities, says Emily Chaney, director of enterprise public relations and reputation. She describes the company’s approach as a sort of “hybrid workspace.”
Whether through physical gatherings or over virtual connections, the important thing is that companies have time and space dedicated to innovation, says [DWM] blogger Ray Garries, president of Global Fenestration Advisors. “I always suggest that clients use a ‘war room’ to create project focus and be disciplined about use of the space for key innovations,” Garries says. “The space can be as simple as an isolated conference room, or as elaborate as a new building just for innovation.”
In order for product innovators to be the most effective, “We need to separate them,” Tuetken says. “So, we have an innovation lab, an incubator, where we basically keep that team collectively, and task them with understanding consumer problems or what customers desire.”
That’s what brought Tuetken to the industry. Prior to doors and windows, she worked as a senior industrial designer and brand manager for a kitchen tools and gadget company. She spent time as an industrial designer at Michael Graves Design Group, working on home health care products, lighting and decor, and also at Kyocera Communications, designing cell phones for the North and South American markets.
“I remember talking to Pella, and I was like … doors and windows … it’s really the building envelope product that people actually use and experience. So, it’s more of an active relationship that people have with doors and windows, than, say, siding or drywall,” she says. “That, to me, made it a really interesting space for innovation—especially human-centered innovation.”
Getting Paid to Fail
Of course, human-centered and human-driven innovation also means embracing failure, Sorice and others suggest.
“If you’re doing innovation right, you’re working on things that will never go to market, because they may not work,” he says.
By budgeting for and making mistakes part of the process, “The best thing about generation one is you can always throw that away and go to gen two,” Sorice says. “You get the right to reinvent what you did well, and what you didn’t do well.”
Also, just because something works and is a great idea doesn’t mean it’s viable, says Lindsay Schroeder, senior director of Marvin’s transformation management office.
Part of innovating includes falling in love with ideas, Schroeder suggests. That’s what drives the process. But you also have to learn to let go.
“It might be a great idea. But then you have to go through the whole process of [determining] if it’s actually feasible and what we can make if it isn’t meeting the needs of our customers,” Schroeder says. “Then, even if we can make it, can we actually sell it and make money? There are a lot of great ideas that don’t make it out the door.”
That’s not to say they never will. Many end up on a proverbial shelf, only to be revisited and brought to market later, she says. Others come to market immediately. And that’s where Dean Ruark, PGTI’s vice president of engineering, saw an opportunity for his company’s lab.
In October 2019, PGTI launched iLab—a 24,500-square-foot facility that serves as a product incubator. But the same facility serves as a micro-factory, Ruark says. He envisioned iLab not only as a space for innovation and invention, but as a self-funded operation.
Like other labs, PGTI’s facility creates prototypes and develops initial builds. The unit also assists in setting up mass-production and even produces product—often in very short order.
Meanwhile, the pressures of self-funding haven’t made the group any less creative or daring, Ruark says. If anything, it’s just brought product engineers closer to market.
“It keeps our engineers tuned to customers and not just these pie-in-the-sky, five-year innovations,” he says. “We love those, but we fund [the lab] off of driving solutions today as well … It gives them an outlet to just play and tinker a bit, but we run it like a business. We sell product out of the iLab and fund our innovation efforts.”
Meanwhile, the group’s idea file is “huge,” Ruark says. “We have a lot of people who’ve been in the door and window industry for a long time and they geek out over this stuff. So, we always have way more ideas than we can execute on.” Also, “When we develop a product that’s too popular, that one just graduates to one of our main facilities,” he says. “If it’s a hit, everyone is excited. If not, our feelings are a little hurt and we go try again.”
It’s the commingling of business with creativity that makes innovation so exciting, says Bill Sifflard, Quaker’s vice president of corporate marketing. The question is, “What can we create that’s going to sort of transform the market?” Sifflard suggests.
In the process, “It’s important to just continue to push the envelope and raise the bar higher,” says Chad Bolen, Quaker’s product testing manager. “There very well could be something right around the corner. And we want to be the ones leading that.”
The emergence of so many labs, “It just means the industry is starting to move,” Sifflard says. “We really want to be at the crest of the wave and not falling.”
Quotes
“If you’re doing innovation right, you’re working on things that will never go to market, because they may not work … The best thing about generation one is you can always throw that away and go to gen two.” – Cory Sorice, Masonite’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer
“We’re actively seeking input from other people and from outside of our walls, so we’re not designing in a vacuum.” – Lindsay Schroeder, senior director of Marvin’s transformation management office
“My cute way of saying it is—the space is like Santa’s workshop, because people just get to tinker and play and do all of the fun things back there.” – Jenn Tuetken, Pella’s director of innovation, design and brand experience
Why So Top Secret?
As a function of business, innovation is ultimately about competition. And that leads most door and window companies to keep their labs top secret. But it didn’t begin that way for Pella.
“It was just part of the overall space,” says Jenn Tuetken, Pella’s director of innovation, design and brand experience. “We quickly realized that sales team members or external partners could walk through there and take pictures of prototypes, and we were like, ‘No, no, no. We can’t do that … we have the latest technologies from our partners back there that no one should know about. We have our own concepts and prototypes. We have information and data that you can’t make public from a research perspective.’”
These days, the vast majority of employees—probably more than 95%—have no idea what the company is working on “back there,” she says. Every project is top secret and gets its own code name.
Drew Vass is the executive editor for [DWM] magazine.
dvass@glass.com
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