Vale Joe Turner 1946 - 2026

The window furnishings industry is mourning the passing of Joe Turner, who built Image Blinds in Brisbane with his wife, Lynne, into a 50-staff manufacturer and was president of the industry’s national association from May 2000 until 2019. Joe passed away peacefully at home, aged 80.

He was a Hall of Fame inductee and life member of the Blind Manufacturers’ Association of Australia (BMAA), now the Window Shading Association of Australia (WSAA).

From the building site to Luxaflex

Joe came to the trade by way of the building industry. His family’s cattle property was going through drought when they moved to the city, where he served his time as a carpenter, studied the building code at night school and qualified for a builder’s licence. “But actually, I disliked building and one thing I always wanted to do was selling,” he told Tony Cassar of Victory Curtains and Blinds in an Ask the Expert interview for WFA at SuperExpo 2019.

He answered a Luxaflex newspaper advertisement in 1965. The managing director told him he was too young to be a salesman and made him an installer. With his carpentry background, he said, “everyone wanted Joe Turner to fit their product because they knew it would go in well.”

About 18 months later, a salesman broke his leg, and Luxaflex gave Joe the hardest sales area in Brisbane. Sales, he recalled, “just went really berserk.” He kept the territory when the injured rep returned, won salesman of the year for 12 years and was promoted to sales manager for Queensland and then to general manager level. He turned down moves to Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne because Lynne was about to have their first child. He stayed with the company for 21 years and kept the gold pin and gold watch Hunter Douglas presented to him for 20 years’ service.

Image Blinds

A Qantas upgrade to business class put Joe beside advertising agency owner David Delaney on a flight to Sydney, and again on the flight home. Along the way, Joe had also completed a marketing degree. Delaney offered him the general manager’s role at his agency, Delaney DD&A, and Joe left Luxaflex. He went on to help build the agency to $28 million in billings.

Uniline Australia, one of the clients he had brought across, drew him back to blinds. Uniline had let its retail business, Finn Blinds, run down because it was selling against the customers it supplied with componentry, and offered to sell its northside operation to Joe and Lynne. They bought it, and over dinner their daughter suggested a new name: “Dad why don’t we call it Image Blinds?” The business traded as Image Blinds (formerly Finn Blinds) for about six months before the old name was dropped. That was 1986.

Over the next 30 years, Joe and Lynne built Image Blinds to 50 staff, making its own products and keeping them Australian made where possible. “One of the things I found was that if you don’t manufacture yourself, customers don’t have faith in a product that you’re buying in,” Joe said. They sold the business in 2016, his doctor having advised him at 70 to take a back seat. He stayed involved for two years under the new owners before retiring.

The association

His association work began at Luxaflex. As general manager he became Queensland’s nominee to the BMAA committee and was soon made president, a post that then changed hands every two years.

By Joe’s account, the state associations then began to fall away: Western Australia first, then Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, while New South Wales held on. New South Wales staged a convention with displays at the Sydney showgrounds. Queensland ran the next one at the Sheraton, renamed it SuperExpo and held it in June, the industry’s quiet month. With Queensland’s association the only one left, it formed BMAA Australia and invited each state operation to join, and in his words “without fail they all did.” By 2019, he said, the association had 176 members.

Joe was closely involved in forming the association as it stands today, and he served as its president from May 2000 until 2019, remaining on the board in the years that followed. Across the BMAA and its predecessors, the Venetian Blind Manufacturers’ Association and the Blindmakers’ Association of Australia, he held director, vice president and president roles. His presidency took in the 2018 expansion of the industry’s training programs, run by the BMAA with The Frontline Group. “As the industry peak body, we are committed to production in Australia and the highest standards of diverse products and services,” he said at the time. In 2019 he was looking ahead to the launch of the association’s energy rating scheme, WincovER.

The BMAA inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2010. At the SuperExpo 2023 gala dinner, BMAA president Gilbert Da Silva presented him and Ross Emms with life memberships, a category the association had recently introduced. He was also one of the five life members of Fashionline, the group of retailers who manufacture some of their own products.

Beyond the trade

Outside the industry, Joe worked with young people. By 2019 he had been chairman of the interdenominational charity Youth for Christ for 26 years, and the charity ran free camps each Christmas. Each year, he said, “of the 150 probably at least 100 come back changed young people.”

Looking back on his start as an installer, he told Tony Cassar: “I know that I’ve been given a gift and I’m very grateful for that. I’m not a proud person at all; I’m so grateful to everyone who has been a help to me over the years.”

Announcing his passing, the WSAA said that over more than 50 years in the industry Joe “formed lasting friendships and earned the respect of so many. His contribution, knowledge and presence will be deeply missed.”

Joe is survived by Lynne, his wife of 57 years, their daughters Jodie and Sheridan, and his grandchildren Samuel, Ruby, Hugo and Xavier.

Our sincere condolences go to Lynne and the Turner family, and to Joe’s friends and colleagues across the industry.