US play pays off for Adelaide sleep gurus
Their product keeps customers in the dark, but it’s bright times ahead for two Adelaide brothers with a US-first play that’s paying dividends.
Adelaide-based UBlockout Group was named the Winner of the 2026 BDO Fast Movers South Australia program on the back of stellar 236 per cent revenue growth over the past year.
The company, founded in Adelaide and with its global head office still based here, manufactures and sells its blackout curtains in Dallas, Texas. It had been riding the wave of demand for its products, which it hoped would give customers a better night’s sleep.
Co-founder and CEO Luke Boorman said the award was “excellent recognition for many years’ worth of work”.
“These things don’t happen overnight,” said Boorman, who started the company his brother and chief experience officer Josh Boorman.
“It’s a realisation of hard work.”
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The company was conceived of and developed in Adelaide by a small South Australian team and backed by local investors.
The team spent four years researching, designing, testing and developing the blackout curtains before its commercial launch.
In April 2023, the team moved into an empty warehouse in Dallas and built an end-to-end, vertically integrated business to break the mould in “room darkening”.
This included the entire manufacturing process and the distribution of its curtains to customers directly.
Growth was particularly spectacular over the past year due to its growing North American customer base.
Luke said the choice to pick Dallas as the company’s US headquarters was “one of the key decisions that we got right”.
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“Dallas is a great central location. It’s a very good place for business and we’re able to find some of our local suppliers in Dallas.”
Luke visits the US base once every six weeks at a minimum – something he had been doing for the past three years.
But he considered himself Adelaide-based; his family is here, including three young children in school.
Having dominated the US, Luke said the business had other markets in its sights, including the United Kingdom.
“We’ve designed an end-to-end, vertically-integrated manufacturing process to be able to make these shades at very high quality and at speed,” Luke said.
“All of this is scalable and replicable; it can be copied and set up in another location.
“Being able to have your own ecosystem was important to us and we saw it as a critical success factor to have a shot at winning.”
He hoped the company was playing a role in helping people sleep better, with the product targeted at shift workers, parents with young children and light sleepers.
“There’s 25 million shift workers in the US, and then new parents and shift workers have been looking for a long time and have been doing ad hoc solutions to try and create that dark environment; aluminium foil, bulldog clips, blankets, all sorts,” Luke said.
“I’m helping the world sleep. And what a nice mission to have.”
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