£89 Window Awning Sells Out Three Times as UK Overheats

An £89 detachable awning for sash windows has sold out three times since its launch earlier this year. Its inventor, London architect Aimee Daniels, founded the clean-tech startup Shaded in 2023 after UK temperatures hit 40 degrees the previous summer. She argues the product's runaway demand proves a gap in the market for cheap, passive cooling.

"It's a detachable awning for sash windows," Daniels told Dezeen. "It's sort of an alternative to air conditioning."

Daniels grew up in New York with air conditioning and spent ten years working in architecture before turning to retrofit. She saw a country that had ignored the most basic tool against heat.

Why did the 40-degree summer matter?

The heatwave of 2022 forced the question. "I guess the 40-degree weather of summer 2022 put me in an inventive mood, initially in response to my own discomfort and the lack of accessible, sustainable solutions available to deal with it," she said.

The design came directly from her professional practice. "The idea for the awning came through a combination of doing passive design at work, and knowing about the principles and how shade is so effective," Daniels explained.

She launched with modest expectations. "I had doubts and launched the product with the goal of breaking even," she admitted. "The product's success was a great validation that there is an appetite for affordable passive cooling products that also look good."

External shading can cut room temperatures by several degrees Celsius, yet it remains rare on British homes, even in a warming climate.

What does the UK get wrong about shading?

In Daniels' view, the problem is cultural and regulatory. "The UK seems to be the only European country that hasn't clocked on to shading windows as a first line of defence," she said. Blinds and curtains, far more common, can actually contribute to overheating.

Cost is the other barrier. "Right now, it's actually really hard to choose passive cooling for reasons like costs being too high," Daniels said. "Installation is a big driver of cost. The fact that you have to fix something externally to the facade means that you probably need to put up scaffolding, et cetera. It requires specialist help."

Shaded's awnings clip on from the inside, which reduces installation costs to zero. Because the product is "completely temporary and doesn't interact with the building fabric at all," it also bypasses the planning bureaucracy attached to permanent awnings, which are drilled into facades and require applications, drawings and, in places like the London Borough of Islington, formal consent for front elevations of flats, multiple-occupation houses and properties within conservation areas. London's Grosvenor and Westminster City Council has recently given blanket consent for awnings on listed buildings, but policy across the UK remains uneven.

Daniels framed the regulatory maze as a design brief rather than an obstacle. "I went around in circles a lot around figuring out what I have to do to meet regulations," she said.

Who can afford to adapt?

For Daniels, the stakes extend beyond one product. "[Passive solutions] should be the first thing people do, at the very least, before bringing in mechanical cooling," she argued, while air conditioning grows more popular among those who can pay for it.

Following the awning's success, she plans a new range covering more window types, alongside other affordable passive solutions. Her closing argument is blunt: "People need to be able to afford to adapt to climate change." As UK summers keep breaking records, the sell-out demand for a £89 clip-on awning suggests a mass market waiting for exactly that.