About Us

It’s Not Really About Us At All

It’s about you. You came to this website because you’re looking for products to fill a need or solve a problem, and our whole focus is to do just that.

If you really want to know more details about us, you can find those further down this page.

But the bottom line is we’re more focused on you. We know you want products that make sense: economical sense, practical sense, aesthetic sense. You have concerns about risk and liability. The last thing you want is a roof leak or wind damage. You want products that last a lifetime, products with long warranties. You need products with short lead times and included engineered shop drawings.

We get all that. It’s all we think and talk about, and our goal is to improve everyday at meeting our customer’s needs.

We Believe in Relationships

We know it sounds cliché, but we don’t know any better way to say it. We believe in relationships. Our work style is collaborative and partner based. Everybody we cross paths with gets treated with respect, dignity and fairness: customers, vendors, employees, everyone. We also have a healthy sense of humor. Life is hard enough, let’s enjoy what we do.

We work with large and small architectural firms, construction companies and property owners all over the US to design and install projects on office buildings, retail, food industry, hospitals, educational and government facilities. Our products are on the roofs of companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, UPS, Merck, Wendy’s, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Verizon and many others.

Products first. Profits second.

It’s almost embarrassing to admit this out in the open, but we are actually more interested in making good products that work well, than making money. We’re also going to tell you the truth, even if it costs us a sale.

Here’s a common scenario that illustrates what we’re talking about:

A customer calls us because they want to put up a RoofScreen on their commercial building and that the roof structure is made up of 2×12 wood joists. The easy thing to do would be to sell them the screen, take our money and run. But no, instead we tell them the wind loads on an equipment screen will create forces at the roof connections that will require at least 3/8” thick lag screws, and that 2×12 joists won’t be adequate because the lag screws will split them out. We then recommend they add blocking to the roof at the connection points. Silence. That’s not what they wanted to hear. They go away and we lose the sale. They probably went to Home Depot and bought some brackets and steel studs to build the screen. But at least we can still sleep at night.

Ryan Bruce - Founder & Chairman

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and design roof products.

Actually, I wanted to be a helicopter pilot. But then I found out about motion sickness and that was the end of that.

It’s funny how life guides you. It’s also funny how you can develop a passion for the strangest things. Like mine; I absolutely love designing new products that improve the way things are done on commercial rooftops. Where’d that come from?

I was an erector set kid. I loved building mechanical things. I loved taking things apart too (my mom’s Mercedes was an unfortunate victim when I was in high school). Well, I ended up in construction and spent many years in the HVAC, architectural sheet metal, and roofing trades. I know what it’s like to install products that don’t work right. I know what it’s like to chase down roof leaks in a rain storm over a large server room at 2:00 in the morning. I knew there had to be better ways.

I built my first rooftop equipment screen in 1995 while running the architectural metals division of a large roofing company in San Jose, CA. Everyone loved it: the roof consultant, building owner, architect and the roofers. That was my aha moment. The wheels were turning.

Those experiences influenced the early development of RoofScreen Mfg. in 2002.

I’m obsessed with waterproofing. I never want to be on a roof in the middle of the night again. I never want to hear the words dry-rot and RoofScreen in the same sentence (oops, I just did it). I never want to hear from an installer that our system was difficult or frustrating to install. I’ve been there. These passions (obsessions?) are part of our culture.

Now I have a whole team of people who think that way and we’ve grown into a company with unbending standards for quality products that won’t leak.