2 years ago I remodeled my house and, for the first time in my life, wanted to really nail the interior setup. It was pretty surprising to me how bad the internet was at helping me. Try searching the web for interior design resources sometime-- it's overloaded with ad-laden SEO'd schlock. And the furniture buying process is no better. This is a high dollar and high margin area of e-commerce-- I'm really surprised it hasn't been jumped on sooner. Related: http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/16/why-ron-conway-is-jazzed-on...
Next time check out apartmenttherapy.com and curbed.com. They both do an awesome job of showcasing homes with great design, I've used both for ideas in designing mine.
www.houzz.com is pretty good. They don't really help you design it so much as give you ideas, and very often items in the photos are tagger with links where to buy them.
Cool idea, it will be interesting if they can make their process scale while maintaining quality.
Another route they can go down is making the service very cheap and instead making money on partnerships with furnishing manufacturers. It would be awesome to just upload your floor plans and be able to "visualize" how products will actually look in your living room.
I am surprised IKEA doesn't do this actually. Considering how ubiquitous there furniture is becoming, and that a significant portion of people pretty much use them exclusively for their furniture needs, seems like it would be a great thing for them to do.
I know nothing about interior design but this seems like an interesting idea. I could see my friends/family using this service. Does anybody have an idea how much an average interior designer costs?
The only issue I can think of is that it relies on information supplied by the customer. This is always tricky since they might not take the best photos and all that. Also competing only on price might not be the best business strategy. Are there any other benefits to using this service besides price?
Anyway congrats on the launch. Lots of other launches received negative comments on HN but personally I think this one has potential :).
My step-mom charges about $5000 a room (depending on a few factors) in Arkansas. I would expect that to be a bit higher elsewhere.
That said, that involves her coming out and taking measurements, looking at the house, and really spending quite a bit of time with the customer. As stuff arrives she'll show back up and actually make sure it is installed correctly and make necessary adjustments.
This process is a bit less hands-on, and as such it can ONLY compete on price. You're paying less because you're getting less really.
Our decorators typically charge between $600 and $2250 per room, vs $5,000 - $10,000 for traditional decorators. We do want to offer affordable prices to our users, but we're not trying to compete only on price. We also give users the ability to work with top decorators from all over the country (and soon, the world). We've talked to a lot of users who want to work with great decorators outside their local area and don't have an easy way to do that. So while users will get less time with our decorators, they still get fantastic results.
In the article they say that a typical interior designer can cost between 5k-10k. Although, a typical interior designer probably does a number of in person visits and oversees the actual installation. It looks like at this point, the website is just providing detailed plans.
Regardless, this is pretty genius. I can see this working really well with the bachelor crowd. They may have a little extra money, but don't necessarily care for high end and expensive interior design. Additionally, they are more than capable of painting some walls and moving some furniture, they just need advice on how it should look.
If Tastemaker founders are monitoring this, in your FAQ's the question 'What if products are back-ordered or sold out?' has a totally unrelated answer.
Check out the free open source tool called "Sweet Home 3D" to actually mock up your ideas. Don't be put off by the name, this piece of software is actually great.
