Curtain walls are a cornerstone of modern architecture, influencing everything from energy efficiency to occupant comfort. But entering the industry requires more than just technical expertise — it also means navigating the business landscape, from securing the right projects to earning the trust of architects and developers. The learning curve can be steep, particularly when introducing new materials like fibreglass, which push against long-standing industry norms.

For those looking to enter the industry, the path isn’t always clear. From understanding the technical side to navigating market adoption, breaking in can be daunting — requiring both industry knowledge and strategic positioning.

That’s why, in Episode 10, we’re joined by Fadi Yasin and Ashwin Bankar, two aspiring curtain wall entrepreneurs eager to carve out a place in the industry. As newcomers, they’re facing the same questions many in the industry have asked before — how do you get started, build credibility, and work with clients to embrace new materials like fibreglass? So, they’re sitting down with Peter to get his insights on navigating the challenges of launching a curtain wall business.

In this episode, we break down:

• The challenges and opportunities of starting a curtain wall business — overcoming barriers, securing projects, and lessons from the field
• Exploring distinct advantages of fibreglass over conventional materials
• The performance of FRP (Fibreglass Reinforced Polymer) across different climates and its impact on building longevity
• Earning trust in innovative materials — positioning fibreglass as a durable, high-performance alternative
• The influence of building codes — do they hinder progress or pave the way for new facade technologies?

This episode is part mentorship, part industry deep dive, offering valuable insights for those looking to enter the world of curtain walls — or stay ahead of the curve in facade innovation.

Watch this episode now on YouTube!

Haven’t seen Episode 9 yet? Catch up now on our conversation with Ken Levenson, Executive Director of Passive House Network, where we dive into the core principles of Passive House, how they compare to other sustainability frameworks, and why airtightness is critical for modern building codes. Ken also shares insights on New York City’s Local Law 97, the future of embodied carbon regulations, and how policy is shaping the next generation of energy-efficient architecture.

Still curious about fibreglass-framed curtain wall systems? Check out our other videos on our YouTube page! Previous topics include Passive House, Embodied Carbon, “Combustibility,” Installation Partner FAQ, and more!

Transcript

1. Intro [0:00]
2. Why Start A Curtain Wall Business? [2:50]
3. Curtain Walls Around The World [05:14]
4. Shaping Project Success [16:23]
5. Building Trust in Innovative Materials [29:58]
6. Rethinking ROI: Targeting the Right Clients For High-Performance Facades[34:44]
7. Building Codes: Roadblock or Pathway for Fibreglass? [40:28]
8. Looking Ahead… [46:08]

INTRODUCTION

PETER: Thank you for reaching out, and I guess welcome to a very impromptu Curtain Wall Conversations episode. I’ll just set the stage for our viewers—you guys reached out because you’ve read our blog posts, seen some of our podcast episodes, and were curious about fibreglass-framed curtain wall systems.

And that, I thought, was as good a pretext as any for an episode and a conversation. I’d love to hear a little bit about each of your backgrounds—how you found out about us, and what makes you curious about curtain wall in general, and fibreglass in particular?

FADI: My name is Fadi, and I have a diverse experience working across various industries, including construction, automotive, and energy-related product development. My background spans in engineering, project management, and strategy.

Currently, I’m working as a projects manager at an energy product-related company in the US, and I worked for over eight years in the construction industry in the Middle East, delivering some projects in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. I have good connections and a network there, and that’s what started the whole conversation—we were trying to find some innovative products in the industry. I have a friend, his name is Ashia, and Ashwin is a common friend between us, and that’s where everything started.

So, we were discussing the fibreglass industry and how we can implement this in the Indian and the Middle Eastern market, where construction is currently booming, right? And that’s why we came across your company. In our research, we were researching fibreglass companies or companies that deliver fibreglass solutions, and there are very, very few of them—and yours came up right away, right? Then we started listening to your podcast, and we became even more and more interested to explore this, and that’s why we started studying the market and doing some research. But we were faced with a lot of obstacles, and that’s why we are excited today to discuss the fibreglass implementation, as well as evaluating its current feasibility in the market and the challenges it faces.

ASHWIN: I’m Ashwin, a pre-final-year mechanical engineering student in India. I’ve been working to build a foundation in various fields, including design analysis, vehicle dynamics, and robotics.

I worked closely with Ashia on this project, so my role was to assess the technical feasibility of bringing it to India. And I’m glad to be on this podcast—thanks for having me.

WHY START A CURTAIN WALL BUSINESS? 

PETER: Maybe a first question might be—why curtain wall? You guys obviously have a broad variety of interests: automotive, robotics, energy… more broadly. I have an interest in a lot of those as well, but professionally, I’m focused on curtain wall. So why curtain wall? What is it about this market—whether in North America or in India, where I understand you’re both from or based—that makes you see so much opportunity, particularly in this industry or in that subset?

FADI: For me personally, it’s because I worked in the construction industry for a long time, and I see how innovative products get to the market quick—especially in construction. If it’s a successful idea, it would spread, right? And right now, Ashwin is from India, I’m originally from the Middle East but living currently in the US, and having worked in the Middle East in the construction industry, I will tell you how this whole thing started.

So, me and Ashia—who’s the common friend between me and Ashwin—we were sitting in an office, and it was freezing. It was a curtain wall, you know—it was freezing. And here in Michigan—freezing, relatively of course, to you in Canada—but it was really cold, right? So we’re thinking, with the heater on and all, what’s going on? And then that’s what sparked the idea. We started looking into it, and we saw that it’s because of the aluminum. There’s a lot of transfer of energy, right? And that’s why we started seeking different solutions—what could improve this—and we came across fibreglass and found that it would be a great solution for that.

So, it all started with this basic, simple incident. Then we started digging into it, and we were looking for a lot of business ideas that we could implement, and that’s why we started exploring this more and more—and here we are.

PETER: And how long ago was that, that you were sitting in, was it a restaurant? Was it a library?

FADI: It was, yeah, like a library—an office space inside a library. This was a few months ago, back at the end of December.

CURTAIN WALLS AROUND THE WORLD

PETER: You know, having worked across the world in construction you’ve certainly probably never had that kind of situation in Dubai in the Middle East, in the Emirates, where you’re sitting next to a curtain wall and it’s you know way too cold for example.

I mean, not having a ton of experience in super hot climates, I know obviously it can get to be 50 plus degrees above zero there. And this is just for my own general, you know, curiosity.. what are the curtain wall concerns in those super hot extreme climates?

FADI: I can’t think of concerns. Currently, the market is more leaning to use aluminum in most of the curtain wall stuff, but I feel the market is very accepting of new ideas. There’s a lot of spending on electricity—on cooling, HVAC and stuff—so this could be a big factor in saving and reducing HVAC systems for these new buildings and skyscrapers being built in that market.

But again, in our preliminary studies, we met a lot of obstacles. We see that it’s not very feasible, and that’s why we started reaching out to people like you—to see if we should get back to this.

PETER: Yeah, maybe that’s a good jumping-off point for us to describe how we see fibreglass currently in the industry, and why it works so well for us—and for the Northeastern United States market and the Canadian market more broadly. That really comes down to your experience of how cold it is, right?

If the comfortable room temperature is, say, 20 degrees Celsius—maybe it’s 22, maybe 19—call it 20. In India or the Middle East, for example, plus 50 is probably the most extreme temperature you’d see. That’s a 30-degree difference between interior and exterior environments. That’s the kind of thermal bridging you have to deal with or compensate for.

In the colder parts of Canada, we deal with maybe 70 degrees—minus 40 or even minus 50 outside. We do work in the Territories. So, minus 50 outside and 20°C inside means a 70-degree difference between interior and exterior. That puts much more extreme stress on the building envelope, which means much more thermal bridging to minimize. And the benefits of reducing thermal bridging are that much more pronounced.

Between the extremeness of the climate on the cold side, and what’s considered a comfortable indoor temperature, there’s just a lot more stress on the building envelope thermally. That’s where fibreglass really excels—thermal performance.

Fibreglass has a lot of other limitations, right? It is certainly more expensive, as a capital expenditure upfront, than aluminum. It’s a little bit heavier, actually, than aluminum. The kind of shapes you can make with it—the designs, the profile dimensions—it really likes to be this very rectangular, very boxy shape.

It’s difficult to do custom shapes. Custom pultrusion dies are very expensive—they’re about an order of magnitude, so about ten times more expensive than aluminum custom dies. So if you have a bespoke project with certain kinds of corner conditions, certain radiuses, certain kinds of bending, fibreglass doesn’t really want to do those. It flat out can’t do some of them, and others are often cost-prohibitive.

When it comes to more expressive geometry—if you want to do a Bjarke Ingels, a Zaha Hadid kind of structure—you almost couldn’t achieve that with anything other than aluminum.

There’s a variety of other materials used in curtain wall. Steel is used. Bronze is used. We talked about this with Meis—the Seagram Building, right? Seagram Building has bronze frames. Wood frames are used for curtain wall too, for very niche applications, but they are used.

Aluminum is the most commonly used, but it’s far from the only material used for framing curtain walls. It’s used because it’s the least expensive and the most flexible material, and also the most flexible across climate zones.

In a more temperate or hotter climate, the windows and doors are just open all the time. You go down to Phoenix or Arizona, to Taliesin West—Frank Lloyd Wright’s—and everything’s single glazing, with the windows and doors just open all the time for three-quarters of the year. There are probably a few days where it’s too hot and you have a little bit of air conditioning, or it’s too cold and you light the fireplace or start the furnace. But for the most part, the difference—the delta—between the interior and exterior environments is mild for so much of the world.

So fibreglass really is designed—and what we saw, and this is why we started in 2010 doing our R&D, or 2008 even, but 2010 commercializing—was that the pain point was really in cold climates. And that’s exactly what you noticed, Fadi, when you were in Michigan, right next to the curtain wall, and it’s minus 20 outside—around zero Fahrenheit—and you’re like, “This is miserable. What the hell’s going on here? This is insane.”

That’s when fibreglass—and triple glazing, particularly—makes a lot of sense. You can reduce the heating and ventilation. You can almost eliminate perimeter heating with a high-performance facade. You can open up the space. You can functionally expand the usable area. You can have people be right up against the windows or the curtain wall, very comfortably, leaning up against it even.

Construction is geographic, right? And it’s not to say there won’t be advantages to fibreglass in other markets. We see fibreglass being specified—we’ve done industrial projects where corrosion was an issue. And I think this might be interesting for the Middle Eastern market. I don’t know about India as much, but when you have a very humid coastal environment with a lot of salt in the air, and a lot of salt in wind-driven rain that’s very saline, you can have corrosion issues.

And actually, some of the first fibreglass curtain walls were in Saudi Arabia.

FADI: Oh wow!

PETER: So there actually are some predecessors to what we’re doing. There’s one—I’ve never been—but there’s a 20-storey building that has stick-built fibreglass-framed curtain wall. I’d have to do some research, and I’m sure I can get a picture—hopefully dig it out of our archives. That was about 10 years ago, during the early construction boom in that area—early 2000s.

The big construction boom—late ’90s, early 2000s—there was a fibreglass system, I think it was double-glazed. It didn’t have the kind of air tightness or membrane integration that we would use in a colder climate here, but it was mostly, to my understanding, used because of how corrosive the environment was. The corrosion-resistant properties of fibreglass were attractive.

As far as I know, that building is still standing and still performing well. But what it didn’t have was someone to really market it. Because, again, it’s one thing to have a great product—but if a great product is sitting on a shelf…

FADI: Yeah, if there’s no good marketing then it won’t succeed, yeah that’s for sure.

PETER: That’s it—and so much of construction is relationships. So many of these relationships…

I think you’ll have, if you do go down this path and pursue this, you’ll benefit from the relationships you already have from being in the construction industry. What we found is that the most important relationships were with the architects who are specifying this.

Developers are one kind of relationship. Building envelope consultants are another. General contractors are another. Glazing subtrades—another. These are all possible relationships you might have. The client could be a municipality, a pension fund—whatever it is.

But we found, through trial and error—over a decade of trial and error—finding out who’s really pulling the levers and pushing the buttons in the control center to determine what gets specified for high-performance, very specialized systems… it’s the architects. That’s what we found: probably 80% of the traction we’re able to get, and 80% of the decision-making capacity, is coming from the architect.

And then, of course, there are other stakeholders. We have to make sure general contractors are happy, glazing subtrades are happy, and ultimately, the client is happy—but the architect is, I’d say, the majority.

SHAPING PROJECT SUCCESS

FADI: One of the questions I had prepared—do you think engaging with consultancy firms, like architect consultancies, to include this in their project specifications is vital? Right?

PETER: Absolutely. I mean, for such a specialized, niche product, there are so many products in the world, right? Thousands of products out there, and most architects specialize in a certain kind of building, a certain type. Some will do multi-family residential, some will do government buildings, some will do fire halls, some will do hospitals—whatever it is. They tend to specialize. Some will do single-family homes.

There are so many products in the world that, from project to project, they’re probably reusing 90-plus percent of the spec from the last project.

FADI: Yeah, like, even in my experience with construction, it’s usually copy-paste—right? The same spec is copied from one project to another.

PETER: It has to be—and I don’t say that as a negative. I say that observationally and objectively. There are just too many decisions to make, and not enough time or budget. If you had to do 100% new construction, 100% new specification, with 100% of things you’ve never done before, it would take you 20 years to do one project.

But you only have a year or two—maybe a year to design. So you only have so much time, and maybe 10% of the project—probably less—where you can make improvements, try new things, or use a system you’ve always wanted to use but didn’t have the right opportunity. This is what we see all the time. There are probably five or ten architects who want to specify our products for every one that actually gets to.

FADI: I see. And that gets us to my next question—based on your experience, how do you first approach these architects? What’s the best way to approach them? Did you sense they were open to change, or was it more like, “The industry is aluminum, the specs are aluminum, so we’re not going to change this”? How did you manage that?

PETER: Yeah, again, through a lot of trial and error—through talking to a lot of different kinds of firms—we’ve been able, over the years, to find values-aligned firms.

There are many kinds of architecture firms. Even within a category—say, healthcare hospitals—there’s the average, the slightly above average, and the great ones. Broadly speaking, there are a few different categories of firms.

Some focus more on cost-effectiveness. They’ll give you the cheapest hospital possible. Some focus more on sustainability—they’ll give you the greenest, lowest-carbon hospital. And some are the most architectural—the most avant-garde hospital you can have.

Of those, we’ve found the best alignment with the latter two: the most sustainable and the most architectural. We don’t tend to do a ton of work with firms looking for the cheapest, fastest, lowest-cost, lowest-quality thing you can call a building. And those tend to be the ones mostly working for developers.

With all due respect to developers—who are incredible entrepreneurs—they have a different incentive alignment that, in our experience at least, moves away from higher-quality, innovative, more sustainable products. At least in the North American market.

I don’t pretend to speak for every market in the world or all the different business models developers might have, but in North America, developers tend to build to code minimum, chop it up, and sell it. They either sell it as condo units or as a full rental building to a pension fund, a couple of years later.

They might make it LEED certified, or do something slightly better on the surface—but typically, they’re so driven by margins that they’ll have everything made overseas if they can. They’re not super concerned if it’s high-quality, Canadian- or North American-made, low-carbon, etc. If they can get the stamp on it, they’ll use whatever’s cheapest. And if it fails in five years and the warranty’s no good, it’s not their problem anymore—it’s the next owner’s problem. Unfortunately, that’s the incentive alignment.

So, we focus on owner-occupants—people who are going to own the asset for the next 50 or 100 years. That’s municipalities, different levels of government, universities, schools, First Nations and Indigenous clients we work a lot with. Owner-occupied commercial buildings like Enbridge, which are basically crown corporations that have been around forever and will be around forever. Those are the kinds of organizations that see the value in what we’re doing—and that we work best with.

But that took a while to figure out—to sort through all of the world’s possible clients, all of the world’s building types. For us, it’s been low-rise, institutional. That’s where we see the best traction, the best engagement, and the best value proposition we can offer. It’s not in high-rise apartments. It’s not in single-family homes, typically. It’s about finding your spot in the market.

FADI: And is that only because of the incentive—like most developers are more incentive-based rather than quality-based—or is there any technical drawback to using fibreglass in high-rise?

PETER: I would say one of the technical limitations we have currently—though we have prototypes to overcome this—is the type of construction. That’s stick-built versus unitized, right?

So our Thermaframe series—our Thermaframe family of systems—are stick-built, which is to say they’re site-glazed. That’s fine for buildings up to 6, 8, maybe 10 storeys, for the most part.

The Seagram Building, back in the 1950s, was a 40-storey building—stick-built, site-glazed curtain wall. That was done at a time when things were different. Today, no one is seriously doing anything that tall—or anything approaching 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 storeys—without unitized curtain wall. For sure.

And we do have some prototypes for that kind of system. But we’ve found that’s also a very different kind of business. Unitized curtain wall requires a very different kind of facility—one large enough to make that many prefabricated panels.

There’s also a lot of scheduling risk with those kinds of projects. They can be big reward, but they are big risk projects. And to be fair, aluminum curtain walls took about 30 years before unitized systems became common. We’ve been around 10, maybe 15 years. So in the fullness of time—another 10 to 15 years—could we be doing unitized systems? For sure. I think that’s certainly a possibility, if we see the market demand.

We also see that higher-performance buildings tend to be low-rise—the ones going for net-zero, for Passive House. The ones that can’t fudge the building envelope values—they don’t have as many chips to play with—are the low-rise buildings. They have a relatively smaller envelope to work with.

If you want to achieve 30%, 40%, 50% window-to-wall ratio in these smaller building forms and typologies, you don’t have the same flexibility. You can’t cheat it. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ll make this part of the building perform better.” Take the Winthrop Center in Boston—maybe you’ve seen it. It’s a Passive House building, but only part of it is Passive House. This part is all curtain wall, this part isn’t. They have more chips to play with, because it’s such a big building, with so much volume, that they can still hit performance standards in a colder climate using aluminum curtain wall.

With smaller buildings, you don’t have those degrees of freedom. The envelope has to perform. You can’t fudge it. And that’s where we’ve seen the real need—the real demand—for fibreglass high-performance systems: in these low-rise, Passive House, LEED-certified, net-zero buildings. And that’s been through trial and error—but that’s what we’ve found.

FADI: Okay, so then it’s basically about demand, right? It’s not any technical challenge or drawback for high-rise?

Because currently, I think most of the new buildings being constructed in the Middle East are high-rise—that’s where the focus is, especially in developing markets like Saudi. The UAE is already more developed in terms of the construction boom, but Saudi is still on the rise.

So, most of the buildings are high-rise. But you don’t see any technical challenge for fibreglass in that? Nothing?

PETER: Not particularly, no. I mean, there will be some constraints when it comes to geometry—because custom fibreglass pultrusions are quite a bit more expensive. But on a larger building, maybe that’s not even a huge deal.

You’re talking about what—$10, $20, $30 million of curtain wall? So what if you have $200,000 in die designs? That’s a fraction of a percent. Even if it’s 1%, that’s still just $200,000–$300,000. So, I think it’s probably a rounding error at that scale. You might be able to overcome the geometry limitations just by investing in good custom pultrusions and good designers.

Pultrusions are complicated, right? Aluminum alloys used for curtain wall are composed of two or three materials. But a fibreglass composite is composed of dozens. The physics and math of calculating and modeling all the interactions—the different layers of fibreglass, the directions and types of fibres, the composite materials and resins—all interacting with each other… it’s complex.

We’ve found great success working with a couple of different innovation centers here in Canada to help with that modeling, because it’s not as simple as just extruding something out of aluminum and having it work. With fibreglass, you have to do a lot more designing, a lot more testing, a lot more stress testing and analysis before you have the confidence to put it into production.

But if you have good designers and good pultrusion partners, then I think there are certainly architects interested in trying high-performance systems. And we’ll see opportunities to differentiate in the marketplace—doing something more sustainable, that no one else is doing, that’s ahead of the curve, avant-garde. That’s a strong selling point for them as well.

BUILDING TRUST IN INNOVATIVE MATERIALS 

ASHWIN: So, since you’re talking about the technical feasibility, right, we did some calculations using tools like Window and Therm from PerkyLab. Then we performed CAD modeling, we sent the drawings to the manufacturer. We did structural and thermal simulations, but is this the right approach from a business standpoint, since we’re entering a different material or looking into a different material?

PETER: You know, I think you have to—I think you have to try. I think you have to try and see. And, you know, I think the first project’s the toughest, right?

The getting in the ground—you’ll learn a lot by doing, and a lot of it is only learned by getting your hands dirty. There’s a certain amount that you can model, there’s a certain amount that you can predict, and then you’re going to get into the field and find properties of fibreglass that you didn’t know existed. Some of them will be easy to overcome, and some of them will take some engineering, will take some thinking, and will take some problem-solving.

And the only way to figure these things out is to do it.

ASHWIN: Yeah, so basically prototyping would be the way to go with it?

PETER: Absolutely. Prototyping is the way to go. Then find a way—find a client, find a friend, find a contact, find an architect, find a glazing subtrade, find a team—to help you actually put that prototype into the real world. Even if it’s small, even if it’s just a few hundred square feet, if it’s one facade, one frame, get it into the real world, install it, see how it performs, learn from that, grow from that, and incorporate those lessons into your next project—and your next project, and your next project.

But it takes time. This is an industry that rewards patience. Thankfully, you guys are young. There’s time. But this industry certainly rewards patience, and it should, right? I mean, the products that we’re selling, as it were, are expected to last 50 or 100 years plus. If you’re just selling a kid’s plastic toy, even if you’re selling sports equipment, or something as complicated as a cell phone, they’re not expected to last that long. So, people are more eager or open to trying new things more quickly. They’ll try something because, if it doesn’t work a year or two down the road, you just get a new one. That’s fine.

But when something has to last 50 or 100 years—or more—there has to be more risk aversion from the architect’s side. An architect or contractor is going to want to see that this actually exists, that you can touch it, feel it, and see it—even if it’s far away from where they are and where their products are. They need to know that it exists and that it’s performing the way you expect it to. And if it’s not performing the way you expected it to, then you do it again—until it is.

So yes, it will take some prototyping. It’ll take some beta testing as well—some in-situ beta testing—to figure this out on your own dime, effectively. If you can find a patron, all the better. But you need to be making that investment. Your team needs to be making that investment to prove it to yourselves before you can convince someone else, right? You need to have more confidence than just, “Oh, well, we drew a really nice thing on a page.”

FADI: Yeah, right.

PETER: No one’s gonna—no one’s going to give you a million dollars, a contract, because you drew a really nice thing on a page, you know. It has to be something you can touch and feel and see, and know—and have confidence that it’s worked, over a couple seasons already, probably—before they will give it serious consideration.

RETHINKING ROI: TARGETING THE RIGHT CLIENTS FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE FACADES

FADI: We have another question. So, throughout our research, we noticed—or we observed—that energy savings with fibreglass takes a long time to break even, especially in the Middle East and Indian region, right? Especially with relatively lower prices of aluminum. So, why would developers and decision makers choose fibreglass, if we want to convince them to choose this?

I know you mentioned earlier that fibreglass is probably more relative to the colder climate—is that right? Especially with the temperature difference between indoor and outdoors?

PETER: Absolutely. And that sort of payback period, as it were, is much quicker in a colder climate, where we have that bigger delta—that bigger difference between interior and exterior temperatures on average—especially in the extreme. And so, the other part of the payback period is, again, who is the client, right?

If the client is a developer—maybe it’s different in the Middle East, you can tell me—in North America, the typical developer’s idea of ROI is like six months. Not six years, not 16 years, not 60 years. Six months. And so, that is a big limiting factor for the kinds of products they’re going to choose, and the quality of the products they’re going to choose is going to be something that lasts six months, give or take. And if it doesn’t—if it falls apart after that—that’s someone else’s problem. That’s kind of their incentive.

So, trying to persuade a developer, at least for a premium product, in our experience, you’d be barking up the wrong tree. For a premium product—for high-performance products—it has to be a conversation about not just energy, but also durability, right? Whether it’s durability to corrosion, whether it’s durability to expansion and contraction, and the stress on the gaskets and the seals, and the edge spacers of the IGU.

If you can reduce the life cycle impact—the wear and tear on a building envelope—if you can reduce the wear and tear on a building envelope and extend the lifespan of that building envelope by whatever amount, that’s a very compelling proposition for an owner-occupied client, right?

FADI: How is that? How’s that compared with aluminum? Is fibreglass’ lifespan much longer than aluminum, you think?

PETER: So, fibreglass expands and contracts a lot less. Fundamentally, there’s a material science property of fibreglass—it expands at about half the rate of aluminum, and so it actually expands at effectively the same rate as the glass it’s holding in place. Aluminum, on the other hand, expands and contracts at twice the rate, so they’re expanding and contracting in different directions.

To the extent that your clients—or the clients of the architects you’re speaking to—have concerns with air infiltration and exfiltration, with leaky building envelopes, and they’ve experienced those issues, the more you can identify that pain point, the more you can say, “Oh great, we have this very thermally stable system. This very thermally stable solution for you. I know aluminum is not great for leaky building envelopes, and if you’re having problems with that, fibreglass is great for it.”

So, fibreglass is definitely more durable when it comes to the gaskets it’s holding in place, from an expansion-contraction perspective. That means that, over time, you have less heating and stress on mechanical systems as well. Investing in a passive aspect of a building envelope will always reduce strain on the active aspects of the building.

Yes, aluminum may be cost-effective upfront, but what’s the cost of prematurely replacing heating and ventilation equipment because it failed—because the envelope didn’t perform as it was supposed to? That is a cost that a more thoughtful, owner-occupied client will look at. They’ll ask, “Okay, what can we expect our building envelope to do in scenario A? In scenario B?”

Again, every building type is different. We’re not going to make super broad, sweeping generalizations to say, “Oh, it’s this many percent, this many years.” Every building is different. We’d love to generalize, but this is why modular construction of buildings is so hard—because it’s very, very hard to generalize.

Every building, every site is different. Every climate is different. Every geography is different. Codes are different everywhere. Every environment is different. Every temperature is different as well.

But what we do know are the physics. The physics don’t change. Everywhere in the world, the physics are the same. And we can say that fibreglass expands and contracts at half the rate of aluminum, is very corrosion-resistant, and is very resistant to thermal bridging. These are physics-based facts that are true everywhere.

BUILDING CODES: ROADBLOCK OR PATHWAY FOR FIBREGLASS? 

FADI: So, you mentioned codes, and that brings us to one of our questions as well. What do you think—what role do regulations and building codes play in either supporting or hindering fibreglass adoption? And what’s your experience in that?

PETER: So, codes do both. Codes help and hurt.

FADI: Okay.

PETER: Helping side are the U-value side, thermal performance U-values, R-values, thermal performance side. So, like Massachusetts Stretch Code, for example, just implemented recently, BC Energy Step Code similar—you know, British Columbia, Vancouver. Those are great for what we do. Those massively encourage innovative, higher-performance facades in order to maintain the window-to-wall ratios that clients are expecting and the beauty and the daylight that occupants kind of demand. That’s great for us.

On the hindrance side are things like fire codes, and we’ve done whole episodes on this in the past—we’ll link to those. If you guys haven’t checked those out, we definitely recommend them. And this is very geographically specific as well. I mean, thermal—energy—building envelope energy codes are very geographically specific. Massachusetts is leading the way in North America, even ahead of things like the Toronto Green Standard or BC Energy Step Code.

But the fire codes—Canada has one, the US has a different one, Switzerland has a different one, Germany has a different one, Saudi has a different one, India has a different one. To the extent that they may recognize potentially one or the other—I mean, in Canada and the US, they recognize the same ASTM standards for air and water penetration, ASTM E283 and 331. But they don’t recognize the exact same fire code yet. That can change—we don’t know, we’re going to see.

The tests are very similar. The only difference is the US test is a two-storey assembly, and the Canadian test is a three-storey assembly. But broadly speaking, they do the same thing. So, we’ll see what happens with the codes, but the fire codes are one area where, at least in North America currently, for many applications, fibreglass is treated differently than aluminum—even though they perform the same in a fire.

And we’ve demonstrated this in three tests now with Intertek in Texas. We’ve done three tests where we’ve demonstrated equivalency between aluminum and fibreglass—they perform effectively the same.

FADI: I saw that on one of your videos, yeah!

PETER: Yeah, and so the codes are starting to actually accept this as well in Canada, and I’m sure the US will follow suit in good time as well. But the regulatory landscape is always changing. And, you know, I think at this point, from a pure physics perspective—again, from a pure technical perspective—you would look at: okay, these curtain walls are 90% glass. Whether you’re framing them with aluminum or you’re framing them with fibreglass, they’re still 90% glass. No one’s considering glass combustible.

That little 10% of framing that you have—whether it’s mostly aluminum or mostly fibreglass—there’s still kind of a hybrid, right? I mean, there are lots of aluminum-framed systems with fibreglass pressure plates. Our fibreglass systems have some aluminum components. Who’s to say that it’s going to make any difference at all?

And we’ve tested this—not in situ—but we have in situ projects completed. We’ve done laboratory testing to demonstrate equivalency, that it doesn’t make a difference from any practical perspective. The codes may or may not agree with that very technical, physics-based perspective yet, but they’re starting to.

We’ve already seen this in the Canadian fire codes, for example. As of Building Code 2020—which is just now being adopted by every single province in 2025, with a bit of a lag—they’re now recognizing equivalency for certain kinds of curtain wall applications. Fibreglass is considered the same as aluminum, and so you don’t need this additional testing—for us here, it’s CAN/ULC S134. You don’t need that for certain kinds of applications now.

In another five years, it could be that you don’t need it for any applications, because we’ve demonstrated essentially equivalency. Unless you’re going to make every aluminum system also go through this six-figure test, then fibreglass is good to go. And I think, from a very pragmatic perspective, if you actually want to have higher thermal performance and lower carbon, well, then let’s get out of our own way a little bit.

If we’re tripping, we’re tying our shoelaces together and wondering why we can’t win the race. It’s like—well, how about we don’t tie them together? We just tie them up separately and, you know, run.

So, there are opportunities everywhere. The regulations are slow to adapt, but I’m confident that we’ll get there.

LOOKING AHEAD…

FADI: So, looking ahead then, what do you think needs to happen for fibreglass to gain mainstream attention and acceptance in the curtain wall industries? And why hasn’t it gained that acceptance and adoption yet?

PETER: Great question. And I think that fibreglass was… we never brought fibreglass systems to market— we never brought the GlasCurtain systems to market— to be, I guess, mass adopted. We never brought them to market to be, “Oh, we’re going to be 90% of the market one day.” We’d be happy— you know, like Steve Jobs said when he came out with the iPhone— we’d be happy with 1% of the market. You know, the high-performance end of the market.

Because we are leaders, and the market… we sort of create white space for the market to follow us, for the market to catch up to us. So the leader in the market, which is what we are to a large degree in our niche, creates a wake. You know, it’s like you’re in a boat— or more like an icebreaker, that’s a better analogy. We’re like the icebreaker. Very hard work, very difficult to do, much easier to follow behind, right?

So being that first icebreaker… you know, it’s like if you wanted to go from A to N, maybe you just take all the water around it, or you fly over it, or something like this. But to be the icebreaker, to really show what’s possible from a thermal performance perspective— it is a niche. It’s inherently a niche, and we’re okay with that, because that’s still a good business. That’s still intellectually stimulating, and that’s still, we think, a valuable service to the community, to architecture, and to construction.

And, you know, I think that’s what’s important to see— that fibreglass satisfies a specific need in the market, and we recognize that that’s not every need in the market. In the same way that window wall is not every need in the market.

FADI: That’s correct.

PETER: Window wall is a certain kind of need. It’s like, how do we make it look like curtain wall but unbelievably cheap, right? That’s a need for a certain kind of client. That’s what they think their need is. That’s fine. That’s why window wall exists— to make it unbelievably cheap and look like curtain wall. It’s not true curtain wall. It’s cheaper.

You know, a steel frame curtain wall satisfies a certain need in the market for ginormous spans— in giant lobbies, airports, and hotels— things that aluminum can’t do. It has to be so strong, way past what aluminum can do, even with reinforcements. So steel satisfies that niche.

There’s wood— wood-framed curtain walls for people who like to touch and feel the wood. This is a need. People want to touch and feel wood. So, REICO and whoever else— Unicel, a few other guys— have a wood-framed curtain wall, and this satisfies a need.

Fibreglass is like that as well. It’s a niche, and it’s one that we feel was underserved until we came into the market. We have every expectation that there will be more market participants. We’ve already seen several of the more fibreglass window companies try to get into the commercial space, but they’ve been challenged to go from residential to commercial because they’re actually quite different. There’s different logic to the market, different kinds of expectations between residential and commercial.

We’ve chosen to focus on commercial, not residential. And I think it’s important to, again, find your niche— find where you excel. Not to say that you stay in your lane or something like that, but that you can’t do everything either. And you don’t want to do everything. You want to be the best in the sort of areas where you think you have a competitive advantage that no one else has.

It’s a blue ocean strategy, right? You go away from the sharks and the red, bloody waters, and you go to the blue waters where there’s opportunity. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. You still have to have the product. You still have to convince people that you’re worth it, especially with a premium product. But that’s still— I think that’s the opportunity.

The opportunity with fibreglass is that there aren’t that many people doing it yet. And it’s easier to differentiate yourself with a different material. And again, it’s not that you’re going to be on every project, any more than wood-framed curtain wall is going to be on every project. It exists. It’s great for what it is. But it’s for a certain kind of application. And in that application, it’s going to be the best solution possible. And there’s going to be nothing else that can do what it does for that application.

So we’re sort of leading in fibreglass. And I think that’s what adoption looks like to us— satisfying those pain points for those clients that need something that’s net zero, low carbon, highest thermal performance possible, made in North America. These kinds of things that they want to tick those boxes and satisfy those demands, and that’s what they need.

FADI: And yeah, and that’s why I think it makes sense for your company that is already in the curtain wall industry. And that’s why sometimes we question ourselves— in this, in our very new journey, for the last three months— it’s like, why would we go into a business that has so many obstacles and might not find acceptance or a wider market, right?

Why not pick a business that has fewer obstacles? If you were to convince us to come into this market, how would you do that?

PETER: Great. No, I mean, obstacles are a moat, right? So, when you talk about businesses, you talk about what’s your competitive moat around your “castle,” right? You have a castle with a moat, with alligators inside, right? You know, a drawbridge coming down. What is your moat?

In order for a business to exist, it has to have one. So, it can be, oh, you’re the only one in your geography doing X. Or you are, you know, the cheapest—that’s a kind of moat, until it isn’t. You can be the highest performance.

You know, you guys are in automotive—look at the car market. What is Toyota’s moat? What’s Tesla’s moat? What’s Ferrari’s moat? Yep, it’s different. Each of them are doing something different. Each of them is trying to be the best in its area. And that could be on reliability—like Toyota, that’s their moat. Most reliable car. You want one car, you get a Corolla. That’s it, that’s the answer. If you just need one car, the most reliable car in the world, just get a Toyota Corolla. You want it to last 500,000 kilometers? I wouldn’t pick—or recommend—anything else to anyone, in any climate, anywhere in the world, right? You could be at minus 40, plus 40—Toyota Corolla.

If you want the best tech, the best user interface for your interior, you know, tech—Tesla. Tesla has the best tech, right? You want the easiest user interface, the most constantly updated features—you know, easter eggs, over-the-air updates, best software, best tech—Tesla.

You want the best, most emotional engines? You want Ferrari. No one makes a more emotional engine than Ferrari. Maybe Porsche comes close, but you know—Ferrari, right? And you know, the most elegant designs, the most classical, hardest to get. But they’re moats. Each of them is very different from the other.

And so, in the same way, in curtain wall, the guy doing wood-framed curtain wall—his moat is different than the guy doing steel curtain wall, is different than the guy doing fibreglass curtain wall, or the guy doing window wall, or the guy doing Passive House aluminum curtain wall, or what have you, right? Each of these is a moat.

So I would say that—you know—why do fibreglass? And you know, with all of the obstacles and how long it takes to get adoption and sort of break into the market… I would say that’s its own moat, effectively, because other people think it’s too hard.

You know, the easy stuff is the red ocean, right? The stuff with fewer obstacles. You know, it’s like, “Oh, I want to be an influencer, I want to be on YouTube, I want a million subscribers on YouTube.” Well guess what—get in line. A billion other people are competing with you to do that.

How many people are competing with you to do fibreglass curtain wall? Not so many. Not as many, right?

And this is like everything else. This is a fractal of everything else. You know, the harder thing—it’s like climbing Everest versus climbing the hill in your backyard. You know, climbing the hill in your backyard’s easy, right? Anyone can do it. A toddler can do it. Everest is hard. And this is why it’s worth doing—because it’s hard.

Obstacles are a competitive moat. And that’s where the sort of success lies.

FADI: I like that. Yep, so you think then it has big rewards?

PETER: Yeah, I mean, depends how you define rewards. I mean, if it’s just financial rewards, there’s probably other businesses. If you’re just looking for financial rewards, it takes a long time, and the capital investment is very high. You can be profitable, but it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme by any stretch.

The rewards for us—and this is, you know, someone who’s… whose family, you know, I come from a long line of people who are in architecture and curtain wall and building materials—and so, for us, the reward is that we enjoy this kind of work. And we enjoy, you know, traveling and telling our stories and building cool buildings with great people, and working with great people. This is a satisfying life, and that’s kind of the reward, you know, as much as anything. That you get to leave your fingerprints, you know, all over the world—and it’s going to outlast us, right? Outlast 50, 100 years, right?

These buildings will still be there. You know, you show your children, show your grandchildren, “Oh, that’s the one that Dad did. That’s the one the great-granddad did,” right? And that’s the kind of—that’s a reward that… I mean, I don’t know, what’s that worth, right? What’s that worth? You could be worth, you know, a million dollars, a billion dollars, and not have any legacy that lasts 50 or 100 years, unfortunately.

So that’s the kind of—I think—special part about construction in general, and architecture, and manufacturing in particular, is that you get to actually make things, right? Not many people get to say this anymore, right? Most people are just, you know, doing office jobs and spreadsheets and whatever. We get to make things. And we get to make them better and better and better, and constantly improve and read the market and find out what it needs, and constantly adapt.

And that is very rewarding. And that’s—you know—I could never put a dollar figure on how rewarding that is.

FADI: I love that. Yep. That was very, very insightful and very informative for us, and I gained a lot—me personally. And I covered most of my questions. I don’t know, Ashwin, do you have other questions?

ASHWIN: Yeah, I had one question. So, it’s about scalability, right? Can a fibre manufacturer become competitive with PVC-U or aluminum? Or does it inherently have a higher cost? And if yes, what are the breakthroughs you could make in the design to bring the costs down for the manufacturing?

PETER: Yeah, compared to PVC-U, I think PVC-U doesn’t really exist in the commercial market here in North America as a curtain wall system. I’ve seen a few of the sort of passive house European hybrid PVC-U aluminum windows and things like that. I don’t know how those would really deal with an extreme climate. I mean, PVC-U expands and contracts like crazy. It has very poor thermal stability. It has good U-value properties, but it’s very thermally unstable. So it’s not appropriate for the kinds of products we’re working on, and we don’t really compete with it.

Could fibreglass ever be competitive with aluminum? Aluminum is inherently not very expensive, but it’s also very political as a material. We’re seeing things like tariffs—big tariffs—on aluminum. Aluminum is also extremely energy-intensive. And if energy prices keep going up, with competitive demand from things like data centers and AI, aluminum prices will likely rise. Fibreglass prices, by contrast, are much less volatile. They’re higher than aluminum for sure, but very stable over time.

The material cost isn’t even the big part of it. It’s the fabrication. The labor intensity of working with fibreglass, the dust it creates, the ventilation required to manage it, the special training, the wear and tear on tools—all of that adds up. You need special diamond-coated blades to cut it because it’s very abrasive. So those fabrication costs will always be higher.

Even if the raw material costs were the same, fibreglass will still end up more expensive as a finished window or curtain wall system. I’m not sure it’s ever going to win on cost. But in the same way, is aluminum ever going to win on performance? No. The physics say no.

It depends on what you’re trying to optimize for. If it’s just cost, PVC-U is even cheaper than aluminum, and aluminum is cheaper than fibreglass. But you get what you pay for. A Corolla is never going to compete with a Mercedes. They’re different segments. Is Mercedes ever going to get cheaper? Well, they have an A-class and B-class, and Toyota has Lexus that goes up the scale too. Maybe they meet somewhere in the middle, but on average, there’s still going to be a difference.

FADI: Well, thank you so much for your time, Peter, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn more about this field. It’s very insightful. Me personally, I have learned a lot in this session, and thank you—we really appreciate it.

ASHWIN: It was a very informative session, and yeah, thanks.

PETER: And we wish you guys, you know, the best of luck in whatever your pursuits may be—whether it is in the fibreglass space or in another space. You guys are obviously young, creative, full of potential, and yeah, no, it’s a great sort of niche within the industry, within the curtain wall industry, and we’d love to follow your success and your journey wherever it takes you. So, thanks—thanks to you guys as well for reaching out on LinkedIn, for finding us, and for following all our episodes previously. We look forward to keeping in touch.

FADI: Thank you, thank you so much. I’ll keep following your updates and news, for sure, in this exciting field. Thank you, Peter.