Change at the top has arrived at one of the industry’s buzziest startups. Four years after co-founding The Expert with designer Jake Arnold, Leo Seigal has stepped down as CEO to become the company’s executive chair. Taking over the role is e-commerce veteran Lee Anne Blake.
“I see myself as a zero-to-one builder,” Seigal tells Business of Home. “I’ve never scaled a business beyond the Series A phase, which is where we are now. And toward the end of last year I could just feel we needed a fresh set of eyes to really capitalize on this organic momentum. … Having a partner in Lee Anne to actually grow the business will allow us to get to that next level.”
Blake, who most recently served as chief growth officer for registry site Babylist, is a newcomer to the home industry. “I’m really excited about the stage that The Expert is at,” she says. “They have product market fit, they’ve innovated, they’ve learned a lot over the last three or four years, and I can help them grow. … The fact that they’re trying to embrace and understand designers, not replace them, is the way to do it.”
She joins The Expert at a pivotal moment. Within the industry, the site is probably still mostly known as a platform that allows elite designers to charge for short virtual consultations—sometimes as much as $2,000 for 55 minutes. However, in 2023 Seigal and Arnold unveiled an e-commerce marketplace offering product from high-end brands like Schumacher and Apparatus. Originally, they targeted consumers—the same people who came to the site to pay for designers’ time. However, Seigal soon found that his best customers were—surprise!—the designers.
“When we launched, we realized that the trade was shopping on the platform, even though we didn’t have a trade program at the time,” he says. “Our team had done such a good job curating brands and products through the lens of the interior designer that we were making life easier for the trade. … By the end of 2024 we had more than tripled our trade revenue over 2023, and it was apparent that this was becoming our North Star.”
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Now, the fees that The Expert generates on consultations (it takes a 25 percent cut) account for only a fifth of its revenue. E-commerce makes up the rest, with the majority coming from the site’s trade program. Seigal says that it’s “on track to reach 5,000 accounts” by the end of the year.
The hiring of Blake—who has spent her career scaling e-commerce operations—signals where The Expert is going next. The company has built an engine, and now it hopes to put some gas into it. Simply by increasing the platform’s wallet share of its current customers, Seigal says the business can reach a nine-figure annual revenue.
In seeking to scale a purchasing platform aimed at the trade, The Expert enters into interesting territory. The model, sometimes called a “digital multiline,” holds obvious appeal for designers and brands alike: bringing the convenience of online shopping to an industry that has remained stubbornly old-school.
However, there are plenty of hurdles too. The trade is high-touch, and selling customizable product is complex. The Expert’s goal is to become an efficient, multibrand procurement tool that can plug into designers’ workflow—a significant challenge that many have tried to overcome, with varying success. “The big thing we’re going to invest in are tools and technologies to empower design firms,” says Blake. “We’ve got the marketplace, being a one-stop shop with the best brands, [and] we layer on customer service to help them track orders. [But] there’s a lot more we can do to build out those tools, using AI and other technology to [increase] efficiency and make [designers’] jobs easier.”
In its quest, The Expert has a built-in marketing advantage: the experts themselves. With a roster of roughly 250 designers ranging from high-profile veterans to buzzy up-and-comers, the platform can credibly claim to represent a who’s who of the industry. Most designers already know about the platform because they know the experts—and many would like to be on it themselves.
Seigal is candid about the fact that one side of the business feeds the other, and that The Expert is limiting its onboarding of new talent (it adds roughly one designer per month) to firms that are shopping through the site. “We would never do a quid pro quo in terms of ‘anyone who spends X amount of dollars can get onto The Expert,’” he says. “However, it does make sense for us to limit our consideration to those who are already shopping with us and supporting us.”
Whatever initiatives are rolled out under Blake’s tenure, she’s clear-eyed that the platform will live and die based on securing the trust of the trade. “There are other startups that have tried to engage with this industry,” she says. “Getting the trust of both brands and firms is why our approach is really different. I think we’re getting there.”
Correction: April 24, 2025
An earlier version of this article misstated that The Expert takes a 20 percent cut on designer consultations. The platform now takes 25 percent.
