An innovative super-elegant new Venice sun umbrella look has been launched by Shade7 and enthusiastically embraced by residential and commercial customers alike. It began with a simple comment, wondering about removing the dangling pulley rope from Shade7’s Venice sun umbrella. It seemed impossible, but the idea sparked a game-changing design.
The Venice sun umbrella is one of Shade7’s most popular umbrellas of all time, valued by commercial venues and residential customers for its simple elegance, lightweight to handle, incredible strength and durability, and range of colours and sizes.
The Venice’s strength and durability is in great part due to the fibreglass frame, aluminium pole and UHF resistant canvas. As Shade7 likes to say of the fibreglass arms, “think fishing rods”, able to flex under great pressure. The aluminium pole has a 2.2mm thick wall making it stronger than most, yet still light enough to move easily when required. With twenty-two colours to choose from in premium solution-dyed, UHF-resistant European-made acrylic canvas, the Venice sun umbrella is in wide use across New Zealand, the Pacific, French Polynesia and beyond.
So why change what is already working so well? Shade7 loves to take what is already great and make it even better. The launch of the new design Venice Pop Up is a perfect example of this.
The original Venice Classic model is like any traditional sun umbrella with a rope and pulley. To open the umbrella, the rope is pulled, hand over hand, raising the canopy. Once the canopy has been raised to fully open, a hub pin is slid through the umbrella pole beneath the umbrella hub, holding the frame and canopy open. Now you have a very long rope hanging down. How should you manage it?
Shade7 designed a special hub pin with a dip in it so the long length of pulley rope can be tidily looped just under the hub when the umbrella is in use. However, even a tidily looped rope can look awkward, and when there are many umbrellas grouped in a café or resort, chances are that some pulley ropes will be disarranged – stuffed into the frame or around the hook in a tangle, hanging in a single long rope down to the ground, or even anchored around furniture. Not ideal, and not conducive to a relaxing ambience.
Solution? Remove the rope and pulley. How? Create a unique balance of tension in the frame itself, using the powerfully strong nature of the flexible fibreglass arms as the means to keep the tension in play over the many years’ lifespan of the Shade7 Venice umbrella. No sagging canopy, no tangled or dangling ropes, and no fight to get the hub pin in place.
Credit Bri Woolnough
The result is a stunningly elegant umbrella with clean lines from top to bottom, the same incredibly strong structure as the Classic, and the ease of opening and closing the umbrella with one hand instead of two. The Venice Pop Up is a winner all round and has been welcomed by residential and commercial customers alike.
If you are interested in having Venice umbrellas branded for commercial use, try out the amazing new Shade7 logo mock-up tool. To view the Venice Pop Up in your own space, try the configurator on the Shade7 website, or to view in person, find your nearest reseller or visit the Shade7 showroom at 1096 Great South Road, Mt Wellington, Auckland.
