Shopping has always been a social activity, but only recently have sites like Stylehive, Crowdstorm and ThisNext begun to make its social aspects explicit with ways to make recommendations, seek advice and discuss products online. Now Design My Room brings segmentation to the game with a site focused specifically on interior design.
"Give your room a makeover" is the proclaimed purpose of Design My Room, which launched into beta in August. The site lets users test out interior designs either on sample rooms provided by the site, or by uploading a photo of the real room they have in mind. They can paint, furnish and decorate the room by selecting from thousands of products—from sponsoring brands Armstrong, Benjamin Moore, Kohler, Smith & Noble, Whirlpool and others—and then dragging and dropping them wherever they want. Rooms created by professional designers are also available for inspiration and copying. Users can save multiple versions of their room and offer them up for rating and comments to friends or the site's audience at large. Then, once they've settled upon the look they like, shopping for the items they've chosen is made easy via an automatically linked shopping list, which keeps track of their selections all along.
Basic members of Design My Room are given one free project, which they can save and redesign as often as they like. A "plus" membership enables 5 projects for USD 4.95 a month, while premium members get 25 projects for USD 9.95 per month. Uploading a room photo costs an extra USD 25.
"When my wife and I renovated three years ago, we had to sign out samples from retailers and lug them around—a heavy piece of granite, a cabinet door, ceramic tiles, carpet swatches, paint chips. They must have weighed 50 pounds," explains Jesse Engle, vice president of business and product development at Massachusetts-based Swatchbox Technologies, which created DesignMyRoom.com. "Next time, we do it all on the site."
In addition to the obvious benefits for users, category-specific sites like Design My Room give brands a clear line of communication with the consumers most likely to listen. Style-forward consumers are eager to create and share content, acting as curators for peers who are looking for inspiration. Time to apply this concept to the niche of your choice!
Website: www.designmyroom.com
Contact: media@swatchbox.com
Spotted by: Xiujuan Pan
I am responding to your information regarding the website "designmyroom.com". I was a member of that site, infact thanks to that site, we were able to design and purchase furniture and other items at Target for several rooms in our home. It was a wonderful site and I didn't know if you were aware or not that a few weeks ago, it disappeared and was abruptly taken over by the Armstrong Co. It was unique and "one of a kind" and was very popular. Armstrong is operating under this name, but doesn't offer anything like the original site. It professes to be a site where you can "design a room", but that's a joke as it's nothing like the REAL designmyroom.com. I have been in contact with several members who are lost without it. Maybe by sending you this e-mail, you can look into the matter and let us know if there will be anything like it in the future. I miss it so much and spent many hours designing and purchasing the goods found there.
Thank you,
Linda K. Mena
lkmena@yahoo.com
Benjamin Moore is a great product if your thinking about making over a room in your house... http://www.aboffs.com/paint.htm