Two new interior design platforms, Ivymark and Fuigo reach beyond simple business support.
Billing, purchase orders, payroll: the necessary evils of running a design business are hardly met with enthusiasm. In addition to being time-consuming activities, they also disrupt the creative process, which begs the question: Must an interior designer in the 21st century be relegated to a life mired in paperwork and archaic processes? Two companies think not.
A little over a year ago, Alexandra Schinasi and Lee Rotenberg were running ArtSetters, a company that connected product designers with brick-and-mortar retailers and modernized the workflow of both. “We had many interior designers who wanted to buy from our product marketplace, which was traditionally tailored to retailers,” recalls Schinasi, a former creative director at Bedlam Productions, the London-based production company that brought moviegoers the 1920s sets of the film The King’s Speech. (Rotenberg hails from the tech world—specifically, the financial portal Investing.com.) Continues Schinasi: “We realized how terribly antiquated their purchasing and workflow were. It got us curious, so we dug a little deeper, and after weeks of research and immersion with interior design firms in San Francisco, we decided to utilize similar cutting-edge technology that we had for ArtSetters for a platform specifically for interior design firms that were struggling with their workflow.” She and Rotenberg raised almost $3 million to start their platform, which they dubbed IvyMark. “We want to be a knowledge center for the design industry and the greater trade community, open to everyone, including people who are not Ivy members.”
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