Today we’re excited to unveil the public beta of WellFurnished – the simplest way to discover, search and shop for beautiful furniture and home décor.  While building it, we spent a lot of time looking at how consumers and interior designers looked and shopped for décor and furniture, and focused on how technology could make that whole process better.

We noticed that when people get in the mode of shopping for furniture, they start paying attention to pieces in friends’ homes, catalogs or magazines, and then take photos or clip them.  Next, they go from store to store on weekends (usually sticking with stores nearby that they’ve seen ads about), see if they like something or get suggestions from designers or employees in the stores.  If they find something they like, they pick up a catalog or specs and save it to a short list.  Very often people ask friends or family who they trust what they think about their top choices, and then finally make their selections.  All this takes a lot of work and time, and leads to much frustration.

So, WellFurnished has set out to improve and radically simplify home decorating by letting you:

• Search across products from over 50 different stores, ranging from Ikea and Target all the way up to high end stores.

•  Save favorite items to your WellFurnished profile for future reference, including products from any website via the easy “Like it on WellFurnished” bookmarklet.

• Organize collections (i.e. baby’s room, couches, Smith Family Living Room etc.) and make them public or private. This is a great tool for interior designers who don’t want to share their work till a project is finished.

• Get advice or feedback on your choices by simply clicking on “Ask A Question” to find out what specific people (like a client, or your spouse) think.

• Follow your favorite designers and trusted friends to see what furnishings or décor they are recommending and stay on top of trends or new products.

• Discover new products as you browse by looking for “Similar Items,” which often appear on product detail pages.  This beta feature analyzes the attributes of each photo, ratings, and other data we have on the item to build a similarity index (keep in mind that this tool is brand new, and its accuracy will improve as more people use it).

We have lots of new things planned for designers, consumers and furniture manufacturers over the next few months – including building a program for top designers and curators to be compensated when people buy things that they have recommended on WellFurnished.  We’ll roll this out when we have enough users and curators to be successful, and in the meantime we would love to get more ideas on how to improve the site!

Tapan