Designing for Designers: Why We Built a New FF&E Tool

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One of the bigger lessons I took from my time scaling WeWork was just how little software innovation exists in the world of FF&E—Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment. While massive resources have gone into BIM tools, project management platforms, and construction tech, the software landscape for interiors has remained surprisingly stagnant.

After nearly two decades working on design tooling for the built environment, it was clear to me that interior design—arguably one of the most human-facing, visual, and creative domains in architecture—was being left behind. The industry’s largest software companies have barely acknowledged it. As of this writing, Autodesk doesn’t even list interior designers as a user group on their website. That says a lot.

This blind spot opened up an opportunity for us: to build something simple, visual, and powerful that reflects how people actually work in the 2020s—not just in construction or documentation phases, but in the fuzzy, collaborative front end of design where ideas take shape.

We focused on the early stages of the design process—where inspiration, product discovery, and spatial thinking collide. This is the part of the workflow that often plays out through pinups, moodboards, decks, and Miro boards. It’s informal, iterative, and intensely visual. And since the pandemic, much of it has moved online, happening in fragmented ways across tools like Miro, Mural, PowerPoint, or even shared folders and screenshots.

What we wanted was a canvas. But not just any canvas—a space purpose-built for designers, specifically those working on physical spaces. One that could bring together the best parts of whiteboarding tools and presentation software, but with added intelligence and structure relevant to architectural workflows.

A Tool That Understands Design

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So we built it. A design canvas in the browser—lightweight, collaborative, and intuitive—but grounded in the unique needs of FF&E and interior architecture. The result is a semi-infinite space where designers can drag in images, sketch layouts, organize product inspiration, and build early-stage spatial ideas—all without switching tools or breaking flow.

But to do that well, the tool had to meet a few core principles. These became the foundation of our product:

1. It must be connected to the internet’s vast product and image ecosystem.
   Designers are constantly searching, clipping, and referencing inspiration across a sea of sources. The canvas needed to feel like an open surface—one that could pull in images and products from anywhere and let designers work freely with them.
2. It must be vertical-specific.
   Unlike general-purpose whiteboarding tools, this needed to understand architecture. It had to know what a room is, what a square foot is, what a schedule is. If a designer places a sofa or a chair on the canvas, the system should know what that means. Not symbolically—but semantically.
3. It must be fun, vast, and unstructured.
   Great design happens when people are free to explore. We didn’t want to force people into rigid workflows. Instead, we built a space that’s intuitive and expressive—a place for iteration, not just documentation.

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Beyond a Pretty Interface

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Of course, building something like this in the browser—especially for an industry still deeply tied to CAD and desktop tools—isn’t a small challenge. But we knew from the start that the tool couldn’t live in a silo. It had to integrate into the rest of the design stack. And more importantly, it had to improve that stack—not replace it.

One of the traps design software often falls into is trying to become the only tool, rather than a better tool. That approach usually fails. People don’t want to throw out what already works—they want ways to work smarter, faster, and more collaboratively. Our approach was to augment the designer’s workflow, not reinvent it from scratch.

A Smarter Back End

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While the canvas is what most users see, what makes the system powerful is what sits underneath: a semantic data architecture built specifically for FF&E.

That means when a designer drags a product onto the canvas—say a chair, sofa, or light fixture—the system knows what it is. It understands the object’s category, dimensions, and even pricing data. This gives us the ability to stream real product catalogs directly into the design surface, letting users browse, search, and drag in real items—complete with metadata and sourcing details.

Because of this semantic structure, the canvas isn’t just visual—it’s smart. It can track what’s inside any zone or area. It can calculate square footages. It can tally products, budgets, and material counts—all in real time, as a byproduct of the creative process.

From Moodboard to Product List

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This is what truly sets the tool apart: it can turn a loose visual layout into a structured, usable output. That means designers don’t need to stop what they’re doing to build a separate spreadsheet. They don’t need to manually keep track of items. The canvas knows what’s in the design—and can generate real product schedules or FF&E budgets automatically.

What starts as a pinup can end up as a procurement-ready document. The same drag-and-drop process that gets a team aligned visually also creates data-rich, trackable deliverables for downstream stakeholders. No rework. No translation needed.

Building With, Not Just For, Designers

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We didn’t do this in a vacuum. We built the product side-by-side with real users—interior designers, architects, FF&E consultants, procurement leads. We validated assumptions early and often. We shipped fast, iterated frequently, and constantly asked: does this actually make your day easier? Does this reduce friction or add it?

What we heard, again and again, is that people were hungry for a tool that felt modern. One that respected their process and gave them space to think. And one that didn’t just look like it was for design—but was actually built around design.

That’s what we set out to make. And that’s what we’re continuing to evolve.

There’s still so much room to grow. But at a time when physical space is becoming more hybrid, more flexible, and more data-rich, we believe designers deserve tools that keep up. Not general-purpose platforms, not add-ons—but real, purpose-built systems that understand what they do and help them do it better.

We’re not just building a canvas. We’re building a new kind of design infrastructure—one that starts at the earliest sketch and stays useful all the way through to execution. And we’re doing it with the people who know space best: the designers shaping the future of our interiors.

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