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business elite canada
H
NOVEMBER 2014
“Not only are our windows exceptional from a thermal resistance standpoint,
they’re also exceptional from a water penetration resistance standpoint.”
envelope,” Battistel said. Most of the windows
being used in large commercial buildings at
that time had aluminum frames with low R-val-
ues; vinyl wasn’t an option because it wasn’t
stable enough to hold large spans of glass. The
solution? Fiberglass.
That’s when an owner group from RDH part-
nered up with John Sawatzky, a fiberglass win-
dows specialist, and decided to launch Casca-
dia Windows, smack in the middle of the 2008
recession. During the first year, the owners
hired employees to run the fledgling company
but soon realized that manufacturing fiber-
glass-framed windows was more complicated
than anyone expected. They needed to dedi-
cate one of the owners from the RDH group to
run the company, and in 2009 Battistel stepped
into the Cascadia role full time.
“The first few years were very difficult be-
cause we started right when there was a re-
