The midday sun in Phuket is brutal. My fair skin all but bursts into flame after thirty minutes of exposure to its punishing ultraviolet rays if not protected by thick applications of sunscreen. Such was the state of my face and arms when I reached the offices of Shades one recent lunchtime. Thankfully, Shades Managing Director Graeme Chuck soon took me out to experience first hand some of his company's handiwork.

After a short ride to the Royal Phuket Marina, 3 of us were comfortably seated for lunch at Skipper's Sports Bar and Restaurant: Chuck, me and Yanty Hong, the company's administration and sales manager. We sat at an outdoor table underneath a broad green umbrella--a product of Shades that protected my pink skin from further damage.

Umbrellas, though, represent only a small portion of the business these days, Chuck says. Big projects call for sail shades, large tensioned-fabric coverings with sculptural curves and dramatic angles. On Phuket, they can be seen outside resorts and restaurants, and they're beautiful to look at. It's precisely those swoops and sways in their designs that make sail shades stable and durable.

"It's all about shape and tension," Chuck says. "If you take a flat piece of cloth and tension it, it'll flap like mad. But if you put a shape on it, it doesn't. The fabric is a mesh, and two sides go up, two sides go down."


On a properly designed sail shade, the weight of tension on the fabric membrane reaches up into tonnes. And, he adds, designing a sail shade that can handle all that weight takes some heavyweight number-crunching. Computers do all the work, of course, but the processing required for a typical job runs in the neighborhood of 1,300 pages of calculations. Keeping a shade sail anchored means knowing about all of the tension and compression points and how those forces change with the weather.

"Depending on the wind, you actually get uplift forces on the posts," he says. "If you're in doubt, though, these sails won't go anywhere. These sails tend to create their own breezes. We work with it ... especially if we know about the prevailing winds."

Chuck first came to Phuket in 2003 for the King's Cup Regatta. Trained as a geologist, he started a career in mining in Melbourne, Australia and worked his way west in his native land, later operating businesses in Southeast Asia.

Phuket, though, was the place he wanted to spend his retirement, and like many retired people, Chuck soon started looking for projects to keep himself busy. With a partner, he started Shades in early 2005 to make custom boat covers.

"After eighteen months we made a conscious decision--no more boat covers," Chuck says. "It just didn't look like there was enough potential."

"Well, now and then we do dinghy covers," Hong adds. "Graeme does them for sentimental reasons, and quite a few people ask for them."

For business inspiration, Chuck turned his sights back home. In Australia, he says, building regulations now require provisions for shade. The ozone hole over Antarctica can stretch as far north as southern Australia, so protection from the sun is a matter of public health policy. As a result, modern shade sails--they were used in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome--trace their popularization to Australia during the mid-1990s.

"It was quite obvious to us where we had to go and what we had to do," Chuck says. "When you come from Australia, you can't help but know about shades. We affiliated ourselves with who we could figure out is the best company building shades in Australia. Now we build a lot of our own membranes, but we didn't start out with zero knowledge. We started with all of their knowledge."

The first customers were resorts and mom-and-pop businesses, he says. Soon the company started getting larger projects for hotels, real estate companies and developers. The average value of projects is growing "remarkably," Chuck says, and the bulk of the current work in-house is for commercial clients. One includes thirty-eight rooftop shade sails.

"It's all about design," he says. "Every shade sail has to be designed individually. Our software can even place the shade exactly where our clients want it. We really want to be able to talk to architects and people designing things. If you can design with this in mind, we can really do a lot."

Chuck shies from citing sales figures when asked, but he notes that the sales target for Shades is 4 times the sales figure for the company's first year, only 3 years ago. Shades currently employs eighteen people, including 2 executive staff, 2 designers and staffing for 2 craft shops: fabric and metalwork.