About Us
KC Masterpiece
Hello. My name is Kennon McKinney & I am the inventor of the new PERMAstitch Staple System along with the CaMilllon Fabric Inert. My journey in the Awning Industry began shortly after I graduated High School in 1989. I knew right away that I didn't want to go to College but didn't have a clue how to make money. Luckily we had a family friend that was down on a short visit visiting my folks & he kept raving about all the money he was making in Ohio hand cleaning awnings. After days of never ending excitement he wanted to prove to me that what he raved about was for real. I'll never forget, he went to the original KC Masterpiece Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas.
At that time they had a burgundy & white striped
awnings although the photo to the right currently
shows black canvas. I'll never forget, John sold
the cleaning for $288.00. It took us only 2 hours
to hand clean the vinyl awnings & he kept $200.00
& gave me $88.00. At 18 years old I had just
earned $44/hour and of course you can imagine
what happened. It lit a nice entrepreneur fire in
my tail. I will be forever grateful to John for
showing me how to earn such a nice income at a
young age. I soon started to comb the Kansas City area looking for dirty awnings but they hadn't really caught on in that area of the country yet. So not so long after that I got a call from an old grade school buddy in Houston, Texas and he invited me to move in with him and a buddy in a 3 bedroom house in Houston & share in the rent. I immediately moved to Texas but had to get a job to pay the bills. A family member helped me land a job at the local Budweiser distributorship. I began to notice that Houston was full of awnings so I had some business cards made up & started pitching my highly needed service. Soon realized I was making more money on the weekends than I earned all week working for someone else. My boss thought I was crazy to quit my job because they only hired people that were vouched for by existing employees. Everybody swore I would come crawling back begging for my job. That of course never happened......thanks again John!
So in approximately 1991 I began my full time awning hand cleaning business known as Spotless Awnings, Inc. Soon we grew to be the biggest awning cleaning company that Houston has ever seen. We cleaned just about every Sonic, Subway & Fuddruckers just to name a few. By the time we landed a 60 location pawn shop chain that we cleaned ever three months, we knew we were well along our way.
But soon our customer’s started asking for us to repair and replace awning covers. I remember looking at the detailed framework of some of these awnings and thinking "I will never be able to figure out how to make these things"....lol. I began subbing out one of my current competitors. Things went fine for a while but soon he started cutting corners on my jobs & the final straw came one day when I had to actually remove an awning he installed for me & bring it to his shop to fix all the mistakes made. This was my jumping off point. I began using my profits from the cleaning to acquire the needed equipment to build awnings for myself. Believe it or not, I will be forever grateful to him also. So in 1995 I bought my factory "no money down" from the knowledge I learned after buying Carlton Sheet's course I bought off TV. I will forever be grateful to Carlton too. By the way, I highly recommend that course even to this day. At first we used the warehouse just to park our cleaning vans in but soon rigged it out to go to work.
Since "Spotless Awnings" was known pretty much as a cleaning company, I had to launch a sister company to step out of that shell. So in approximately 1996 I began Back-Lit Awnings &
Canvas. I chose the name because I was always fascinated with the power of a back-lit style awning. You get so much more sign for the money when using these types of awning systems.
A dull & boring building can brought back to life with a lit awning with beautiful day and night time exposure.
We still build beautiful custom awnings and canopies in Houston today! We take pride in the high quality
& attention to detail that my craftsmen put into every project. The same people have been working for
me for over 15 years & the quality of our awnings really shows. I will be forever grateful to my team!
So while learning how to master the art of building the highest quality awnings & adopting the best techniques from my competitor's jobs I learned of the "staple in" method of building awnings. This system wasn't new but new to me. I quickly learned that we could build our awnings much faster than the traditional "sew & lace" system we were currently using. Our awnings always bottle necked in the sewing department. We were always waiting on the sewers to finish sewing the covers. We would wait sometimes days and even weeks before the job could be installed & completed. We loved the staple system because there was no waiting. The same guys that built the frames could staple in the fabric, install the graphics and go and hang the awnings. I called it "going from A to Z". There was only one MAJOR problem.....that was the finished look of the awning. For those of you that have seen a stapled awning knows what I'm talking about, that dreaded PVC plastic insert used to hide the staples.
Us
Them
An awning trimmed out with a plastic reed never matches the fabric in color or texture. I wondered why they didn't offer a fabric covered insert, it just made sense to me. So I sewed and laced our awnings because I just couldn't stand the look that the PVC gave off in the field. As a matter of fact, we carried rubber hammers in our cleaning vans because this PVC would fall out of most of the awnings we cleaned here in Houston due to the constant change and harsh weather here.
The final straw came after completing the blue awnings seen in the photo above. After developing some photos I took of the completed job. I couldn't but help notice the soft matte finish of the canvas but how the sun glistened off of the glossy PVC insert I was forced to use. This was the point where I decided not to staple awnings anymore until they came out with a better product to trim these awnings out.
So time went on and I kept getting calls from residential customers that were upset that they would call the local awning shops wanting to buy a small awning for over a kitchen window or such and that the sales reps wouldn't ever show up. So that's when I came up with the idea of
a "prefab" awning system. This would be an awning in a box that could be purchased by a home or business owner, they could assemble it and hang it themselves. I pictured a seamless, stapled awning that would be of the highest quality. The only problem is that the existing staple systems on the market were quite costly due to the uniqueness and the designs being patented. So in order to build my prefab awnings not only did I need to design a better "awning in a box" but I also had so design my own awning staple system.
That is when I came up with the PERMAstitch Staple System. I knew my design had to be completely different than the others because I surely didn't want to be sued for patent infringe-
ment. So I remembered that when I used the existing staple systems available at that time, that the staple channel were always square in design. I also realized that fabric is always stored on a roll and it naturally likes to lie in a rounded fashion. So I thought, why not a rounded staple channel? And that is when the light bulb went off!
So that is when the concept of a rounded staple channel was born. Shortly followed was the beautiful idea of a truly fabric covered insert. That is when the CaMillon Fabric Insert was born. If I was to have a superior staple extrusion, I surely had to have the best trim to finish the job! The BEST
part of the CaMillion is it's the ONLY universal fabric covered staple insert that EASILY works in EVERY staple system!
As we used our new staple system and fabric inserts on our custom awnings in Houston we began to notice how much cleaner the extrusion would bend when ran through our bow bending machine. Obviously because the channel is less restrictive than its predecessors. We also loved the fact that when inserting the tip of the staple gun into the staple channel, the fabric just dropped into the staple channel and instantly "spooned" into the channel. The contact between the fabric that came off the roll and the rounded staple channel was a match made in heaven! The attachment process was much smoother & we used far less amount of staples. But here is one of the best parts of the improved design, the ease of recovering. When trying to gut or remove the old fabric from the competitor's designs we realized that there was no way to remove all the old staples. All we could do is pull on the old fabric and almost all of the old staples & some of the fabric was left in the staple channel. So when it came time to staple in the new fabric, it became very sloppy & most of the new staples would deform and wouldn't set. So we wasted an unbelievable amount of staples when recovering. So we knew that we could only recover an existing awning maybe once before we would have to sell the customer new framework. But wait, shouldn't an aluminum frame system last a life time? The beautiful part of the PERMAstitch Staple System staple channel being rounded is that each and every staple can be removed with a small flat head screw driver. You just use the rounded channel to slide the head of the screw driver under each staple, pry back on the channel & easily "pop" out each and every staple. This means that when you begin stapling in the new fabric you’re stapling into a bare metal frame. Again each staple sets cleanly & precisely. It also means the frame can be used over and over again. Simply marvelous! We also love the way our CaMillion Fabric covered inserts & the PVCaMilllion plastic inserts seated down into the staple channel and didn't stick up above the plane of the fabric. At this point since the seam did not "protrude" like the old PVC inserts did, that is when the name came to me. I thought our inserts are similar to a Chameleon. You pop it in, take few steps back and the seams simply disappear.....just like the majestic reptile. So that's when the name came to me but I had to spell it uniquely in order for it to be trademark worthy.
So that leads me up today. Currently we've offered our unique and patented awning system for resale though some of the big distributors. A few have sold the product but none really used the product for its true value. With today's acrylic fabrics and vinyl’s being warranted for 10 years it just doesn't make sense to use the traditional PVC inserts anymore since they only last about half the useful life of the cover itself. It doesn't make sense to build a beautiful awning or canopy, use a superior outdoor fabric that is made to last a decade, then trim it with an insert that rarely matches & is made from a completely different material than the fabric itself. Again, in our optiion, this just ruins the whole look of the awning itself. Just to know that the awning will look terrible during only half of its life expectancy is simply cheating the customer. Awnings are used to enhance and beautify a home or business so why use a product that will defeat that whole purpose shortly down the road, it makes since right?
I want to thank you for reading my story and learning why this has become a labor of love & why we are so adamant about earning your business. We are here to help & answer any questions you may have but most importantly we are here to
SAVE YOU MONEY!
Our goal is to offer the highest quality awning and canopy staple system hopefully at the best prices! We hope that one day the CaMillion will be avaialbe in EVERY color of EVERY out door fabric used in Awnings, Canopies, Signs or Boat Tops so that your trim ALWAYS is a perfect Color & Texture match...GUARANTEED!!
Call or email today for samples or to place an order. Thanks again for your Time!