Mydoma Studio, the interior design project management platform, has acquired eDesign Tribe, the designer directory, education and 3D rendering platform. As part of the merger, Mydoma will also acquire eDesign U, which offers virtual courses on how to run an online design business.

The acquisition came about after eDesign Tribe founder Jenna Gaidusek approached Mydoma CEO and co-founder Sarah Daniele last fall about collaborating on an event. “Those talks grew and expanded, and the more I got to know Jenna and her community, I saw a lot of value,” says Daniele. “It was almost like going on a blind date where you’re like, Oh, there’s actually something really important here. It happened very naturally and organically. We saw that we’d be better together.”

Daniele, an interior designer, started building Mydoma with her husband Thomas Martineau in 2014 to help run her own firm. After realizing that the pain points she had solved were shared by many designers, they launched Mydoma Studio as a wider software-as-a-service. The resulting platform offers tools for project and client management, purchase orders and invoicing, vendor and team collaboration, time tracking, mood boards and product sourcing.

Gaidusek’s path to developing eDesign Tribe is similar. After nurturing e-design as a side hustle while the burgeoning field was taking off, she quit her day job in 2015 to focus on it full-time and quickly realized that it was a desolate industry. “A lot of designers started asking me how I was putting my boards together, how I was working digitally with my clients and how I was getting clients,” she says. “[In e-design] you’re not connecting with people. It was very lonely.”

To address the gap in the market, Gaidusek started eDesign Tribe as a Facebook group in 2018. It soon became a central hub in a fragmented industry—a place where e-designers could commiserate, share tips, and follow the ups and downs of the corporate platforms like Havenly and the now-defunct Modsy. From there, Gaidusek went on to develop an online education platform, eDesign U, and a suite of tools, including a user-friendly rendering engine that allowed designers to create their own 3D models. As the pandemic injected a dose of rocket fuel into the e-design world, Gaidusek’s group swelled to 4,600 members.

When she met Daniele in 2021, Gaidusek realized that Mydoma offered everything eDesign Tribe lacked—and vice versa. “When we looked at our respective communities, it was like we were two counterparts that fit together perfectly,” says Gaidusek, who will stay on as Mydoma’s new director of community and education. “I get to focus on all the things that I love. That was Sarah’s number-one question when we started: What do you want to do? I get to take it back to why I started [eDesign Tribe], and that’s community and education.”

The two companies will merge over the coming months, with eDesign Tribe being absorbed into Mydoma. “Members of eDesign Tribe will be welcomed under the Mydoma umbrella,” says Daniele. “They’re going to get access to all the same great features they have currently, plus the new additional ones that Mydoma offers.” Once the merger is complete, one of the first initiatives Gaidusek and her team will focus on is launching a community that will educate, connect and train interior designers.

Looking ahead, Daniele is hopeful that the combination of platforms will give Mydoma a three-pronged strategy to stand out from competitors. “We’re going to be a leader in the industry, not just in software, but in community and education,” she says. “We look at it as a trifecta of value.”

Homepage image: A rendering made using eDesign Tribe’s platform | Courtesy of Mydoma Studio