Home vent manufacturer scaling up and growing through partnership

One of Aria Vents’ first prototypes, meant to discreetly cover in-home vents.

What an Aria Vent looks like today.

Aria Vents is up to something.

The manufacturer of discreet vent covers for homeowners has been in business since Sept. 2016, when Paolo Mantenuto started the business with his daughter, Roberta Mantenuto.

Back then, they were manufacturing steel covers to use on home vents to keep them covered so they blended in with a home. The idea was a steel vanity piece that would blend flush with the wall, so vents would be less of an eyesore.

The business took off. Co-founder and CEO Roberta Mantenuto, Paolo’s daughter, mentions heavily using Instagram to market and promote the product during its early years.

“Originally, we were heavily relying on Instagram for a lot of our ads, but in those early years, it was a lot of word of mouth that got us around and really started to see us take off,” Roberta says during a walkthrough of the manufacturing facility in September.

The company has recently partnered with Tripar Inc., a Que. steel and CNC manufacturer, to scale up their operations and improve the quality of their products and manufacturing processes. This partnership was a result of Tripar’s Director of Administration, Lauren Sevack, who was having her home renovated, and noticed the improved vents upon completion, and decided to reach out to Aria Vents to discuss the product.

The discussions led to a partnership which has allowed Aria to begin exploring new products as they look to improve upon the fixtures in many homes.

“Once you have our vents you’ll look around your home and start to see surfaces and blemishes and things that you’ll want to cover up. That even happens to me, looking around my own home. We’re exploring products around discreet covers for light fixtures, power outlets and other stuff as well,” says Roberta.

Aria shares their designs and samples of their parts with Tripar Inc., which allows for a full engineering review, to improve the manufacturing of the products for either metal stamping or CNC fabrication. Where possible, Tripar proposed components that could benefit from investing in tooling, such as progressive dies to permit some parts to be made via metal stamping instead of CNC. According to both companies, these kinds of investments led to a reduction in the cost of the manufacturing, as well as the production time for the products.

These days, Aria is increasing their marketing efforts to match the scale-up in production.

“Our advertising efforts have definitely expanded and are a lot more organized now. We’ve seen a lot of traction on TikTok, and Instagram continues to be a strong platform for us,” says Roberta.

One area of concern that the small business is having to regularly deal with is in the realm of patent infringements.

Roberta mentions that she’s seen a number of copy-cat discreet vents being sold that are a rip-off of Aria’s own products. The CEO made it clear how Aria has handled the situation.

“We’ve been very aggressive on the litigation front. We’ve shut down a number of copy-cat vents that have tried to use our designs, and I want to make sure that other companies know that we’re not afraid to continue protecting our patents.”

Roberta emphasizes that as a small business, it was important for the company to be vigilant against these types of copy-cats in order to remain competitive as a business.

The father-daughter business continues to adapt to the post-pandemic climate. Their products, a brainchild of Roberta’s engineer father Paolo, is combined with the marketing and business-savvy his daughter’s displayed since the company’s inception.

Aria Vents says they are continuing to look at areas of the home that can be improved with discreet vents and covers, and are excited about the ways they can improve the look and feel of areas we seldom give a second thought to.

How and where they go from here will be interesting to see, especially for small manufacturers facing similar issues and challenges.