Baltimore, MD –  Rockland Mills wants to put competitors to the test by holding other drapery producers responsible for claiming to be “99-percent blackout.”   

YouTube® is the vehicle for this message about Roc-lon blackout drapery lining. The YouTube series that launched this week features Mark “the shark” Kresel, Rockland’s executive vice president of sales and marketing.  

In this online series of demonstrations, Rockland tries to prove its fabric is 100 percent blackout. Roc-lon is a polyester-cotton base with “multiple layers” of lining and Roc-lon coating. It also tries to establish that Roc-lon is the best reducer of noise as well as the best insulator on the market.

In one video featuring a competition between Roc-lon and a “top selling brand of woven blackout,” Kresel, the Professor of Blackout, stands in a white lab coat behind a table to put the experiment to the test. On the table sits two rectangular glass fish tanks, each with two floodlights. Kresel removes the woven blackout from its packaging and drapes it over the tank. He then does the same with the Roc-lon blackout over the other tank.

Mark Kresel is Professor Blackout

Once both tanks are covered in fabric, he turns off the room’s lights and turns on the floodlights inside each of them.

But, only one tank appears in the dark. It’s the tank to the right; it’s not the Roc-lon tank. Words appear onscreen: “If it’s not 100% blackout, it’s not Roc-lon.”

On its website, the company says that among its many features and functions, Roc-lon drapery fabric is also great for preventing “wandering eyes in this time of heightened security awareness.”

In its video for noise reduction, Kresel again stands in a white lab coat behind a table. He has headphones on and is chewing an apple over the fish tank.

Then, a sleep study cited in an article from The New York Times article about the effects of sleeping through noise: “Every time noise occurred, blood pressure went up” reads the screen.

When Kresel holds the Roc-lon fabric tightly over the tank, crickets are heard. When he removes just a corner of the fabric, a rock song is heard.

Rockland Industries has been in operation since its establishment in 1832 as a fabric and finishing plant north of Baltimore.