Fresh from a successful debut in Chicago, Refined Haystack is headed for Atlanta.
That means creating community for interior designers. Granting luxury homeowners access to good design. And building bridges among designers and clients alike.
Established by Sabrina Vodnik in December 2014, Refined Haystack is on a roll, exceeding her expectations. “The designers are engaging – uploading images and tagging products,” she says. “The next measure is that our designers are getting projects – I ran into one on our registry who’s doing a 4,500-square-foot home, and the homeowner found her on our site.”
The interactive site streamlines the design process by providing a network of local design resources, allowing designers, homeowners, showrooms and stores to connect and collaborate more effectively and efficiently.
“If a designer tags a product, we count that as a connection – it’s activity and it’s growth,” she says. “When we launched, we had very few tags; now we have more than 2,400 product tags at the 16-month marker.”
Refined Haystack encourages interior designers and design resources to co-market their businesses online, therefore doubling their marketing efforts through qualified reviewing and product-tagging features. “We have 350 reviews and more than 7,000 photos uploaded from designers,” she says. “That shows the community is responding, as designers sign up weekly. It’s all positive.”
At the same time, the platform offers homeowners insight into a designer’s style, the sources they work with and the price ranges they fall within. “We have more than 150 resources now, and it’s populating increasingly,” she says. “Holly Hunt is the resource most tagged on site.”
Atlanta, where real estate is at last making a comeback, is a prime market for the site. “It’s like Chicago – decentralized and fragmented – and an important hub for design in the Southeast,” she says. “Like Chicago, it has the Merchandise Mart and a lot of different pockets of design, but also everything from trade to retail and no place to go and discover them all.”
That’s about to change now.
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