New Trend Outdoor

Joe Pozeg ( founder of New Trend) wanted to make his mother a special gift for her birthday, so he built a six-foot high family coat of arms made of steel for her rose garden. It was that project of love that planted the seeds for Pozeg’s custom design fencing company, New Trend Corp. “I thought to myself why not try and make a living in this business,” he says. But it would take another three ye

ars before Joe started doing it the fencing on a part time basis
With pen and paper in hand, he visited local hardware stores to get ideas about how he could improve fencing that for decades looked basically the same, he says. “No one was doing anything differently in the fencing business.”
Sitting around a campfire in the fall of 2006, he came up with his idea of a mixed leaf design for a fence, which today is one of his best sellers. His maintenance-free fencing consists of steel painted black. The first test of his design was at the London Home Show in March 2007. We had one of the most packed booths in the entire show,” Pozeg says. “That is when we knew we had something.”
At that show, a buyer for St. Jacobs-based Home Hardware approached Pozeg about displaying his fencing at 10 of its stores in Ontario on a trial basis. “The response was great,” he says. Today, Pozeg sells his designer fencing to six hardware chain stores across Canada and is looking at expanding into the United States. Business was so good that he bought Perimeter Manufacturing and Distribution, a Kitchener competitor that specialized in chain-link, vinyl and ornamental fencing. He also moved New Trend to its current location on Lancaster Street in Kitchener. While a small portion of the company’s products are made overseas, a lot of the company’s fencing is produced at plants in Cambridge, which Pozeg says fits in well with the growing consumer trend to buy local. Pozeg has also ventured into bamboo fencing. He says the name of his company says it all. “We are not just selling a product. We are selling an attitude. We are trying to set new trends in the industry.”