February 26, 2018

With so many moving pieces in a design firm, professionals are continually looking for better ways to manage their business. One program, IvyMark, is particularly standing out. Recently acquired by Houzz, this startup is the fastest-growing community and business management tool built for interior designers, by interior designers. KBB spoke with co-founders Alexandra Schinasi (above right) and Lee A. Rotenberg (above left) to find out more about the program, how it can benefit its users and what the acquisition by Houzz means for them.

IvyMark also released this letter concerning the acquisition to help answer questions about Houzz’s involvement in the platform.

How It All Began
Schinasi: IvyMark was founded in 2016 with the mission to modernize the way interior design firms run their business. We realized that many firms still ran on pen and paper and needed a more effective way to manage this complex workflow through technology.

The Benefits
Schinasi: IvyMark’s platform eliminates a lot of the manual steps involved in managing a project and ultimately allows them to devote more time to doing what they like most: design.

The Aqcuisition
Rotenberg: With Houzz behind us, we are already adding development and support resources, with the goal of creating an even better platform and organizing more community events for our members. Houzz will allow us to continue our mission of modernizing the way interior designers do business, while introducing IvyMark to a massive audience and opening the door to new opportunities. More than 1.5 million active home renovation and design professionals in more than 65 categories – including more than 200,000 designers worldwide – use Houzz to showcase their work, build their brands and reach new clients. We are excited to bring the power of IvyMark’s software and community to these professionals!

Features Just for Designers
Rotenberg: IvyMark is a business management tool and community resource for interior designers and other home design companies. The platform enables interior designers to run their entire business – sourcing products, creating estimates, sending invoices, time billing, vendor purchases and more – through an easy-to-use tool.

Other features include:

–Quick Books Integration: Every proposal, invoice and purchase order created on IvyMark automatically syncs into QuickBooks Online for easy accounting.

–Onboarding: The team at IvyMark makes switching to their program simple by onboarding active projects into the system.

–Better Branding: Custom proposals, invoices and purchase orders can be created on the platform and include your branding.

–Team Member Accounts: If you’re working with a team, each member gets their own IvyMark login with permissions set by the account admin.

–Networking: As part of the IvyMark community, designers have access to the program’s online forum and invitations to member meetups throughout the U.S.

-Ivy Academy: Members also have access to interior design webinars, which cover everything from posting on Instagram, attracting more clients and discovering new trends.