My Shower Door owner Bill Daubmann, his wife Donna and two sons have plenty to be proud of as they celebrate their 20th anniversary in business—but it’s the future that gets them most excited.
The company has spent millions of dollars in the past decade on equipment to expand its business to manufacturing and selling other high-end glass products, in addition to shower doors.
“It’s opened up a whole other world for us,” says Keith Daubmann, one of Bill and Donna’s sons. “And we’re really looking forward to tackling whatever that next is.”
Keith’s diagnosis in 1986 for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, was what turned his parents into entrepreneurs. Bill quit his part-time job as a hockey referee because of the extensive travel, as well as his job as an electrical technician. He and Donna started their own company, Unique Storage Systems, so they could work from their home in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Daubmann became the largest dealer of closet shelving in Massachusetts and Connecticut over the next six years. Then the economy took a hit, and they needed something to augment revenue.
“One builder came to me and asked if we would do shower doors. He could not get anyone to do shower doors, and I did not know the first thing about it,” Daubmann says.
Fortunately, he knew enough to sign a licensing agreement with a friend of a friend who made shower doors. He then started learning everything he could. He continued with closets and shower doors until he sold the business in 2000 and moved to Naples, after a hockey friend suggested Southwest Florida.
“We just absolutely fell in love with it,” he says.
Daubmann dropped closets and started My Shower Door in 2003 in Naples. The company moved to Fort Myers in 2010 and into its new Alico Road building in 2019.
The company employs about 185 and has grown to 10 showrooms in Florida, with two more planned. It has sold its business model to six companies across the country. It projects revenues of $40 million in 2023, Daubmann said, and regularly is listed among Inc.’s 5,000 fastest growing private companies.
“You don’t know how many times I tell people I have a company called My Shower Door and they say, ‘You make a living out of making shower doors?’” Daubmann says. But about 65% of revenue comes from the shower door business.
It’s amazing what he’s been able to accomplish, said Max Perilstein, a glass industry consultant who has known Daubmann for five years.
“This is a tough industry,” he says. “He has been able to do things nobody’s ever been able to think about doing.”
Most glass companies are mom and pop shops, Perilstein said. Daubmann has built his business into a chain.
“He’s done it on a higher end,” Perilstein says. “He’s not selling someone a tiny piece of glass for their garage door. He’s selling relatively expensive shower enclosures.”
Daubmann said the goal is to expand nationally.
“Every time I travel, I see all the usual suspects in all the cities, and I say, ‘There’s no reason why there can’t be a My Shower Door in all these cities.’”
Daubmann plans to construct another office on Alico Road that can be used as a training center if the company begins offering franchises.
Branching Out
The family created the second arm of the business, D3 Glass, in 2013. The offshoot—named for Bill and his sons Keith and Doug—allowed the company to make its own products and do fabrication for other businesses.
“It was a brilliant move, but it was a tough move because people don’t usually do that,” Perilstein says. “I can count on one hand how many people had done that; buy all the equipment and do it themselves.”
The company would have had more of a struggle during the pandemic if it hadn’t controlled its own destiny, he said.
D3 Glass opened a new world for the Daubmanns, Keith Daubmann said. They began making other glass products, including office partitions, glass railings and wine closets.
But builders were having a hard time getting architects to sign off on jobs because the product said My Shower Door, Bill Daubmann said. The answer was to create My Architectural Glass.
“That’s my baby, that’s my responsibility,” Keith Daubmann says.
“The glass industry in the past, in my opinion, has not adapted with the times as fast as some of the other niche industries. We see an opportunity of technology merging with glass,” he says.
The company made a $3 million investment in buying an autoclave machine—a large, pressurized oven weighing 88,000 pounds. The machine is needed to make bullet-resistant glass, electrified glass and any laminated products, Keith Daubmann said.
My Shower Door created its brand initially through traditional radio and television advertising, he said. It since has turned to social media with its Facebook, Instagram and YouTube posts. Bill Daubmann tries to post several times a day and sees social media as an important element in getting the word out.
Keith Daubmann has gone one step further with My Architectural Glass: He decided not to spend any money on advertising, getting the word out on social media instead. The experiment has worked. Not only has he spent zero dollars for advertising, two social media sites are paying the company because they are able to monetize the sites, Keith Daubmann said.
The company’s next 20 years are in good hands with Daubmann’s sons running the show, but don’t expect the 68-year-old to retire.
“I’ve thought about retiring,” he says, “and I’ve taken extended vacations, but it’s in my blood.”
Community involvement
Bill Daubmann and My Shower Door believe being involved in the community is important. He is the chairman of the Florida Jobs for Grads program, and is on the advisory board of Florida Gulf Coast University’s School of Entrepreneurship. The company sponsors a wide variety of programs:
10 Make-A-Wish wishes
Sports programs, from traveling baseball teams to SWFL PGA chapter
Workforce Signing Day in conjunction with Lee County School District and SWFL Inc.
Estero High School
Culinary Department
Hurricane Relief Book and School Supplies Drive
Golisano Children’s Hospital Giving Tree
Bill Daubmann’s seven keys for a sustainable business
- Core People: Assemble a great core team whose members have separate skills and are committed or financially invested.
- Marketing: You must get your name out to the public. Build a great website.
- New Opportunities: Always look for new opportunities geographically or vertically.
- Good Accounting Staff: Get a good accounting staff or outsource to a reputable firm that can help you with financial decision-making.
- Building Relationships: Every relationship is vital in business, and every interaction could lead to another great relationship.
- Treating Staff Like Family: As important as your customers are, your staff is as important, if not more important.
- Community Giving: Be involved in community giving, either with your time or financially, as consumers want to do business with genuine people who care about the community that they serve.
Bringing home the autoclave
How do you move an 88,000-pound piece of machinery from outside Los Angeles to Fort Myers? With great difficulty.
D3 Glass ordered an autoclave, an oversized oven that looks like a submarine, in 2020. It cost $980,000 and took 50 weeks to build instead of the scheduled 42. Shipping the machine from Valencia, California, to Fort Myers cost another $75,000 and plenty of headaches for Bryce Holbert, D3 Glass plant manager, who oversaw the delivery in October 2021.
Holbert had to get permits from every state the truck drove through because the autoclave was so large and heavy. Each permit specified a window of time, so if the truck was ahead of schedule it would have to wait, and if it was behind schedule Holbert would have to refile—which could take a couple of hours to a couple of days, he said.
It didn’t take long for the truck to fall behind schedule. Tires kept blowing out, one or two a day, and nobody could figure out why, Holbert said. Multiple times, the blowouts happened in remote areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where the driver had long waits for help to get new tires.
Holbert remembers getting a call on a Friday evening saying that the truck had blown maybe its sixth or seventh tire, but the driver had figured out why: The load wasn’t properly balanced.
The truck was in west Texas, 100 miles from the nearest town, so they had to find a crane service to come out and lift the autoclave off the truck, reposition it and change all the tires. Then they had to refile for permits.
One problem was solved, but it wouldn’t be the last. Holbert received another phone call a week later from the truck driver. He had to be in Houston the following Tuesday, so he was dropping the autoclave off at a rest area in the Florida Panhandle and leaving. Holbert had to scramble in order to hire security guards to stay with the autoclave for the weekend, and find another carrier.
The rest of the trip—somehow—went without incident.
“It ended up arriving in our building one month and one day after it left Valencia,” Holbert says.
