Decorist
Professional interior design, bought sight unseen, for a flat fee.
The question
Professional interior design, bought sight unseen, for a flat fee.
As creative lead on the founding team, I owned the complete user experience: early UX and CX research, platform design, launch, and iteration. I worked directly with the founder, built and managed local photography and creative teams, and led distributed development teams.
Employment: full-time, on retainer, at a startup. Deliverables: platform architecture · UX/UI · art direction · campaign creative.
Challenge
Challenge
Interior design is bought on trust. You meet a designer, they walk your space, you get a feel for whether they understand what you want, and only then do you commit. Decorist removed all of that. Customers picked a designer from a profile, paid a flat fee upfront, and waited for a room from someone who would never stand in it.
Solution
Lowering the cost of saying yes.
The product asked for three small commitments instead of one large one: select a date and time, choose a designer, shop and decorate. Three experience tiers — Classic, Elite and Celebrity — let people calibrate their own risk.
We tested the journey repeatedly, watching where people hesitated. Hesitation is more honest than opinion. We built four things, each answering a specific objection: a style quiz, full-page designer profiles, a public design Q&A, and video consultations.
Later testing found people completing a 20-minute intake form and still not buying. We added a client projects tab with a before-design-after slideshow for every project. Once people could watch the process run end to end on somebody else's house, the money stopped feeling speculative.
Result
From startup to acquisition
75% of participants who viewed the client projects tab and at least one slideshow went on to select a package, complete the intake form, upload their photos and check out, within 30 minutes.
4.9 stars from 3,000 customers. Architectural Digest Innovation of the Year. Featured in Vogue, Dwell, Architectural Digest, HGTV and PopSugar. Acquired by Bed Bath & Beyond in 3 years.
Next
Project.
Each project shows how I make complex technology clear to the people who decide.
