Q: What DO interior designers love about their business?

A: Interior design.

Q: What DON’T interior designers love about their business?

A: Accounting, human resources, endless piles of paperwork, etc

Luckily for today’s interior designers, there are a lot of SaaS software platforms designed to help interior designers streamline, grow & improve the business-side of their business.

One of the most popular interior design business platforms is Mydoma Studio. For those of you not familiar with Mydoma Studio…

Mydoma Studio is a powerful workflow software to organize and execute design projects from beginning to end. Whether they are in person or online, Mydoma Studio empowers design professionals to have the tools, confidence and community to do what they love and be profitable. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a team of 10+ Mydoma studio is your secret weapon to managing and growing your design business. Mydoma Studio is built for designers by designers.

To get a more comprehensive idea of how Mydoma Studio helps interior designers improve build their businesses, I spoke with Dixie Willard from Mydoma Studio. The following is our conversation:

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Dixie, can you tell me a bit about the origin of Mydoma? Why did creator Sarah Daniele build Mydoma Studio in the first place? What did she hope to achieve? 

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Sarah’s initial goal was to create a software that enabled her to sell to and manage her own design clients online.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How has Mydoma Studio evolved? I am curious about how Mydoma Studio has changed since the original concept. What services made up Mydoma Studio 1.0 and what services have been added since then? 

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Mydoma studio 1.0 was a skeleton version of what Mydoma Studio has evolved into today. Mydoma 1.0 was a single user software that included basic document approval, payment acceptance, mood board, client portal, contract approval.

Mydoma Studio has evolved to support designers to build their own repeatable design process for their individual businesses.

• Mydoma Studio now supports multi-user teams with custom roles/permissions.

• Designers can create design packages and sell their services online, whether it’s in person or digital!

• Designers can have complex projects subdivided into spaces/categories/phases. Detailed proposals with products and services include the ability to markup or discount as needed.

• Designers can build their own custom catalogue of products via our browser extension clipper app or by bulk upload of existing product lists. Purchase orders are generated directly from proposals and can be sent directly to vendors.

• Teams can time track by user/project/billable/non-billable and easily add that time to invoices.

• All project communication happens directly through software, so no messages go unmissed or to spam!

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Why do interior designers need Mydoma Studio?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Mydoma Studio was built initially for the small business owner! Sarah understands wearing many hats very well. Ultimately Mydoma Studio is the designer’s secret weapon to scaling their business through building a repeatable design process. Designers can assign phases/status to projects and can leverage project, package and contract templates to discontinue reinventing the wheel each time they start a project.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers manage their clients?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Mydoma Studio keeps all the client and project information in one place - online and at their fingertips. No more saving files to multiple places, communicating with clients in email and text and accidentally deleting information. Mydoma Studio puts the client at ease. They are able to feel reassured and have transparency with their project. They can see their paid/unpaid invoices, signed off documents, communication, and contracts all in one place!

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers manage their vendors?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: A designer’s vendors are stored in one place. At a glance a designer can see which vendors they have relationships with, their discounts, account information, and important links. Vendor lists and products can also be bulk uploaded into a designer's Mydoma Studio.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers manage their employees?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Knowing how long and what your employees are working on is important in a small business. Efficiency is a top priority. Mydoma Studio has a time tracking system. Admins can easily view their billable vs non-billable hours by project and by employee. The Studio admin can also set up roles and permissions for team members to manage what they can and can’t do on a client project.  

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers with project management?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: When it comes to project management, Mydoma Studio helps interior designers keep all the moving parts of their project organized and in one. At a glance a designer and their team can see which contracts are signed, whether an invoice is paid, documents are approved and the order status of a product and the time tracked on a project.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers manage the business side of their business?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Although Mydoma Studio is not an accounting software, it does help designers quickly create invoices for billable time, service and products they sell. The invoices can be emailed to clients for secure payment by credit card. Clients can also log in to their account and pay an invoice by ACH (US) and e transfer in Canada (coming soon). Invoicing is very simple because you set up products and services in your account that can be added and modified to any project invoice.

Paid invoices can be synced to Quickbooks online and the revenue deposited into the correct accounts.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers manage their communications? Employee:employee & employee:customer employee:vendor

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Mydoma Studio has a built-in messaging center! When a new project is started, a messaging group of all the project stakeholders are invited. Messages can be sent on a project level, or more granular by room! At this time employees cannot have private conversations in projects. Flexible messaging is coming in an upcoming release.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: For design companies that sell products as well as services, how does Mydoma Studio help them manage their inventory?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: While Mydoma Studio isn’t an inventory management software and doesn’t specifically track inventory, designers are able to upload their own products into the software.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does Mydoma Studio help interior designers plan for the future of their business?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Designers can run financial reports of gross invoice and package sales through Mydoma Studio. They can also use the pricing sheet to run reports of their gross margins on a per project broken down by product category. Having this infrat on hand allows them to see at a glance how their business is performing at any given time and set goals for the future.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: You have a number of competitors. How does Mydoma Studio compare to other interior design management platforms?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: We do have a handful of competitors with some overlapping functionality, however Mydoma Studio is unique because our focus is on the client management side of the interior design business. Unlike our competitors, Mydoma Studio at its core offers a robust suite of project management features that enables the interior designer to work with on a small local client project to a large residential development project. Throughout the design process, the client, the most important stakeholder, feels confident because they have transparency on the design process and what they’ll receive at the end.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What are the future plans for Mydoma Studio?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: Sarah and our team created Mydoma Studio with the purpose to enable designers to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry and still love what they do! It’s a big vision statement, but Sarah and our entire team have and continue to use it to guide the evolution of Mydoma Studio. The future holds many exciting changes and expansions - many additional features to the software, mobile app and community driven events and opportunities are on the short term horizon.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What kind of support and/or training does Mydoma Studio offer to its users?

Dixie Willard - Mydoma Studio: We offer our users live on-on-one training, in app chat support, on demand recorded video training and self guided video & articles. We believe that our designers learn differently and we like to offer options. Support and training has been a high priority from the very beginning of Mydoma Studio!

Contact Mydoma Studio

Website: www.mydomastudio.com

Email: Contact Page

Facebook: @mydomastudio

Instagram: @mydoma

Youtube: @Mydomastudio

LinkedIn: @mydoma-studio