From his own home-preservation project, Sam Pardue, Indow Founder and CEO, is taking new solutions across the nation.

This easy! Indow’s Erik Montgomery recreates the simple lift-and-press used for every installation.

For evidence that ingenuity starts at home, consider this “how I built this” story from Sam Pardue, Indow Founder and CEO.

It starts 11 years ago in Portland, Oregon. Sam was 44 years old, living in a 1906 Craftsman-style house with 26 original, single-pane windows leaking energy like a bathtub drains water. He could replace the windows, yes. But he’d lose the rippling class, the old-growth timber, the craftsmanship…and his life savings. “Worst, external storm windows kill the soul of an old house,” Sam says.

The solution for Sam and his inventive friend Mark Pratt turned out to be better, cheaper and easier than anything on the market. Wanting to preserve fragile windows on a historic house, they thought, “What about lightweight Plexiglas inserts right up next to the windows?”

“Edge ’em with silicone tubing to press it snuggly into a given space and you’re done,” Sam says. “The old glass maintains its beauty and dignity with more safety and quiet than expensive storm windows.”

In Indow company-speak, that insert is a sheet of custom-cut acrylic edged with a patented compression tube system—lightweight, with no mounting bracket. “Drafts stay out 100%,” Sam says. “Heating and air conditioning costs drop by an average of 20%.”

But quirky, historic window frames often have lost their right angles. Some old windows are atypical arches. How do Indow inserts match up? Each one is custom cut to laser-specific dimensions and shipped to a customer’s home with a “Snug Fit Guarantee,” according to Sam.

The Quiet Heard ‘Round Portland…and Beyond

“I can’t recall the home where we did our second installation,” Sam says. “But after about 100, we said, ‘Who’s buying all these?’ We looked up the homes on Zillow, and a big percentage of our customers were for houses like mine: vintage, pre-1940.” But the fastest-growing percentage of customers, he says, were people buying the inserts for the noise reduction in homes that weren’t necessarily old. Many installations, in fact, were in apartments. Alongside the climate comfort and lower energy expenses, noise reduction was opening Indow to its biggest market.

“Think of brand-new homes next to highways or busy streets,” Sam explains. “Or a homeowner moves in town from the country and failed to factor in street sounds. For a lot of people, noise can be a huge problem.” Instead of those homeowners having to find a new address, Indow fixes the problem where they are. Just as vintage home customers passed the word, so did apartment builders and dwellers.

“We connect them with a fit specialist who says, ‘What’s the nature of the sound? Tell us about your walls, your windows, your situation,’” Sam says. The noise stays out and positive customer testimonials roll in.

Sam smiles. “Our shipment arrives, and someone installs it in the bedroom or home office or living room. And we hear, ‘For the first time, I can enjoy my space!’ or ‘I had no idea how much that noise was stressing me out!’ Those stories make us excited to come to work,” he says.

A Name with No Frame

How Indow got its name starts with a “fancy marketing firm” and a branding and naming study, according to Sam.

“We spent $30,000, and the best thing they came up with was EvoWindow.com. And, we agreed to it,” Sam says. But about that time, an employee dreamed—yes, dreamed—that the company name should be Indow Window. The next morning, he reported the dream name to Sam, and Sam nixed it.

“I said, ‘We’ve spent $30,000 on this marketing firm and I’m going to stick with Evo, thank you,” he says. But the employee came back. “Evo is corporate,” he said to Sam. “Indow is better.”

Sam grew up in Kentucky and got his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He moved to Portland 23 years ago to work for Intel, fell in love with the city’s famed beauty and stayed. “Me, George Clooney, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp all moved to the West Coast,” Sam says of his fellow Kentucky expats. “I’m the only one who ended up in Oregon.”

But Sam kept the lines open with his Kentucky roots. One night after the dream conversation, on a long drive to an investor meeting, he called his top inhouse adviser. “Which do you like more, Mom?” he said, “Evo Window or Indow Window?” In her light Southern drawl, his mom said, “Well, Sam, Indow Window has a nice ring to it.”

“So, we started over with Indow, and I’m happy we did,” Sam says. “The name speaks the product like a window without the frame, ‘window’ without the ’w.’“

Promoting Positive Performance

The fast-growing Indow counts 49 employees for now and is a company with a conscience. Indow recently moved into a bigger factory just south of the airport in Portland’s Cully neighborhood, the most diverse neighborhood in a city known for its diversity. With his love for the area, Sam supports the Living Cully coalition and makes the local population part of his triple bottom line to benefit his customer, his business and the greater good.

Indow is hiring more team members in the neighborhood, for instance, to help create a positive dynamic, Sam says. Not surprisingly, Indow supports historic preservation through Restore Oregon.

And, there’s the Indow open-door policy on business survival, according to Sam. “A manufacturer can’t work from home,” he says. “When COVID-19 hit, we were more prepared than most. Pretty quickly, making it up as we went along, we had an aggressive pandemic safety program. We realized we were using some of the business skills we’d developed in making window inserts—ways to boost morale and keep people safe using lean manufacturing techniques to boost efficiency, quality and safety. We related them to COVID-19 transmission vectors in a workplace and spun out a website to share the shortcuts.” More than 600 organizations around the world have downloaded Indow templates for creating a safe and high-morale workplace.

Indow team members, for their part, are drawn to a business mission-driven to be a positive force in the environment and the community, according to Sam. “We’re working to be an inclusive organization that uplifts and celebrates the voice of every team member,” Sam says. “So, our people know they’re heard and have a path to advance their personal goals.”

Does Indow have any competition? “There are some interior storm windows that few people hear of because they tend to fail the spousal-approval test,” Sam says. “They’re cumbersome. They can’t accommodate window frames significantly out of square. For most folks, Indow has created an innovative new category for interior storm windows.”