Welcome to The Design Index: Why I Built It

Welcome to the very first episode of The Index Podcast.

I’m Laura, an interior designer and the founder of The Design Index.

For the first episode, I wanted to start with the story behind it all: why I built The Design Index, the problems I kept running into while managing my own interior design projects, and how what started as a simple idea for a better workspace gradually became something much bigger.

As a designer, I realised I was spending far too much time on things that had nothing to do with actually designing.

Searching through old emails. Trying to find documents from months earlier. Keeping specifications in one place, invoices somewhere else, client approvals buried in messages, and multiple versions of the same files spread across folders.

The information existed. Finding it was the problem.

So I started thinking about the workspace I wished I had: one place where a project could live from beginning to end, with the rooms, specifications, budgets, documents, tasks, invoices, approvals and communication all connected.

But the more I worked on it, the more I realised that interior design doesn’t happen inside an isolated project management system.

Designers are constantly working with brands, suppliers, clients, contractors, architects and other designers. Sourcing and professional relationships are such a large part of the industry, yet they often sit completely separately from the tools we use to manage our projects.

That’s when The Design Index started becoming more than just a workspace.

Today, the idea is to create a connected ecosystem for the interior design industry: a place where designers can manage projects, build a professional profile, discover brands and products, communicate directly with people in the industry and grow their network.

And it definitely didn’t arrive fully formed.

The platform has changed again and again while I’ve been building it. I’ve added things, removed things, simplified things and completely changed direction more than once.

It’s still evolving.

And that’s actually something I want to be very open about through this podcast.

The Index Podcast will go beyond the platform itself and talk about the side of interior design that doesn’t always make it into the finished photographs: running a studio, pricing, profitability, sourcing, project management, technology, AI, working with clients, building relationships with brands and everything else that goes into making a design business work.