SOURCING TH TRUTH, Erinn Valencich with StyleRow

SOURCING The Truth

BY ERINN VALENCICH

Founder & CEO of StyleRow. Founder of ERINN V. Furniture & ERINN V. Design Group

The design industry is a very tactile one. That’s no surprise to anyone reading this. We love to explore, experience and sell pretty things. It’s built around the need for designers and architects to assemble a stable of resources and products to be able to use in their projects. This used to be done by spending months scouring shops and showrooms, going through catalogs you kept in your library with an endless amount of little sticky tabs popping out. The internet changed all that. Suddenly design professionals could source and discover products right at their desk—online— and work began to speed up. They could access their photos on their phones from trips to the showrooms, trips to Europe, trips to the antique stores. This certainly was an improvement, but the team/collaborative nature of our business poses other challenges with sourcing that were not yet solved. Designers need to share information on products with their team, with the contractor, plumber, architect and with their client for approvals and invoicing. They need to access and share products they love quickly with their team while building out a design. Yet no one had solved the data-accessibility-issue. Where does one keep all these pictures and items and product specs so that when you need it, so that it’s at your fingertips? And at your teams’ fingertips? This is a collaborative process after all yet the software we use was not built in a collaborative way. How do you stop emailing photos you took to 10 reps wondering if the table you’re looking for was at their showroom? How do you get pricing on standard items on the weekend when meeting with a client or after 5pm when working late?

StyleRow solves those data-problems for the design office. Our software and platform allow

SOURCING The Truth

designers to save their work in a digital library and streamline their project management unlike ever before. StyleRow is very different because we focus on the design team collaboration and the designer-to-client tools that are lacking in today’s market. Our singular goal is to help designers share their work with their clients faster and make the work they have done sourcing for one job repeatable and easy to pull from for the next. That means they can take on more projects in the same amount of time and in turn they will sell more product, which is a win-win for the entire industry.

Designers spend nearly 80% of their time copying and pasting data from one source to another. From a PDF quote into an excel budget. From a website into a PowerPoint presentation, then into their invoicing software. This work is not valuable to anyone. It’s busywork. StyleRow

Our curated, INVITE-

ONLY MARKETPLACE allows the best of the best from around the globe to be accessible

to designers... THERE IS NO MIDDLEMAN- designers are

speaking directly to the brand or showroom.

wants to end this giant time-wasted process and allow them to seamlessly add items from our marketplace or their digital library, or their phone or any vendor website, quickly and easily into their presentation and share with their client in one-click in a beautiful interactive presentation. This not only saves you tons of time in the long run, but your client gets a much better experience if you share this way. Clients don’t want 15 PDF’s emailed to them over the course of three months to three years! As hard as it is for designers to keep up with the incredible amount of data they have to manage in their offices imagine being on the client side for a moment? You’re spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for a professional service, yet you’re bombarded with hundreds of emails, invoices all over the place, visuals, links, comments, texts, Pinterest boards, excel files, and then there are the requests for order status, timelines, updates, drawings for approval. Eeessh! Where does a client access all of that and communicate with their designer all in one place? The Client Dashboard on StyleRow. Plus, the client can save it as an icon on their iPhone’s home screen so it functions like a personal app between the designer and the client. How cool is that? Now that designer seems like a true tech-pro to the client. Client has one place to click to access all that’s been shared with them and the best part is, the designer controls all visibility so they can edit in real time, or turn visibility off/

This is the future of sourcing. Create a digital library with everything you love. Shopping a showroom? Upload your images, tag them by that showroom and by product type and you’ll never forget where they were from again. Your shopping trips to the design center suddenly become a really valuable resource for your whole design team. You can curate a design in seconds with work you already did and not forget the products you saw and loved again. Your designs get better. You save

Ifound a new showroom

ACROSS THE COUNTRY

I had never heard of and discovered a brand they repped that I LOVED AND PLACED A SIX-FIGURE ORDER.

time which makes you more profitable. You can do more projects which means the industry can grow as you’re selling more product. This is what we want to enable with our software and it’s working! Designers using the platform claim to have saved about 2/3rd of their back-office time last year managing projects. And it’s a pretty place to work to boot.

The other side of what we’ve built is to help brands and showrooms get in front of designers. That’s why we have the StyleRow Marketplace on the same platform as our workflow tools. I found as a designer I was constantly missing out on new product launches, specialty announcements and finding boutique, fabulous brands from around the world was very difficult. Our curated, invite-only marketplace allows the best of the best from around the globe to be accessible to

COLORS

OF CONTRACT

designers. Brands large and small together side by side, with their showroom reps on the platform so it’s easy to reach out to who you need to connect with. There is no middleman- designers are speaking directly to the brand or showroom. The number of accolades we’ve received saying “I found a new showroom across the country I had never heard of and discovered a brand they repped that I loved and placed a six-figure order” is exciting. I love that the platform is facilitating connections for amazing manufacturers and design teams that are looking for their work. Google is not a good place to source for high end furnishings, we all know that. Some vendors and showrooms

are really upping the game with their own sites these days, which is great. The more information we can make easily accessible to a designer anytime day or night when they need it the better. Sourcing should be fun- and by allowing more designers to find your brand by being in a place they are already working makes it easy for them. The future of sourcing is bright! And we are thrilled to be a part of that.