You applied. Here is exactly what happens next.

Every dealer inquiry is reviewed personally — your trade, your service area, your customer base, and what you want to add. We are looking for a simple fit: a real business, a real market, and a crew that takes pride in finished work. Most applicants hear back within a few business days, and the response comes from a person on the dealer team, not an automated sequence.

If the fit is not there, we will tell you so directly and say why — usually it is a territory question, not a quality question, and we will say exactly that. If the fit is there, we schedule a call about your market. Either way you get a straight answer.

Expect a real call about where you work and where you want to grow. We will ask about your crew, your typical projects, and the competitive landscape around you — and we will share our view from the manufacturer side: which neighboring areas are open, which already have a partner, and where premium-shade demand is heading. Together we will settle on a market with room to build in.

Come ready to talk specifics: your service boundaries, your crew size, and the kind of work you run. The sharper your picture of your own operation, the sharper the market fit we can agree on. This single conversation sets the foundation for everything after it, so we give it the time it deserves.

We will also lay out the business model in plain terms. Our dealers sell AJ Shades products across the country — product-only and wholesale, installed by trusted local contractors. We handle installation ourselves only across Southern California's five counties: San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino. We never promise installs beyond that footprint. If that structure matches how you already operate — you sell and install, we manufacture and support — the rest is logistics.

Preparation is built around people who already work for a living. Your installers will learn the two product families — motorized power screens and retractable awnings in full-cassette and open-roll configurations — along with wind sensors, LED lighting, smart-home controls, measuring standards, and the first-season troubleshooting calls that matter most. Sessions are scheduled around your job calendar, not ours.

You will also assemble your launch kit during this phase: fabric swatches, display guidance, co-branded quote templates, and professional photography of genuine installations for your own marketing. The centerpiece is a working display — a real awning and a real screen the customer can operate — because nothing converts a premium buyer like touching the product.

Your opening order gets white-glove treatment: we review the measurements and the full specification with you before anything is built, confirm every detail, and stay on call while your crew installs. If anything on site looks unusual — the wall composition, the wiring path, the customer's existing smart-home setup — you send photos and receive a mounting plan from people who have installed these products themselves.

After that first signed project, the formal hand-holding ends but the partnership does not: dealer technical help, priority parts, warranty processing, and territory-routed consumer inquiries are permanent. Most partners tell us the first project is the moment it clicks — the product sells itself, the install goes clean, and the customer refers the neighbor.

Ready to start? The inquiry form takes a few minutes. Tell us about your business and where you work — a person will read it.

Not every inquiry becomes a dealership this quarter, and that is fine. Sometimes the territory needs another season to develop; sometimes your crew is at capacity and training would be wasted; sometimes you are still deciding whether premium shade fits your business at all. We would rather have an honest “not yet” than a rushed launch.

When the answer is “not yet,” we will say what would change it: the adjacent market opening up, a crew expansion, or simply a better season. Several of our strongest dealers first inquired a year before they launched. The door stays open, the territory conversation stays honest, and when you are ready, you already know exactly what the path looks like — because you just read it.