Laurel & Wolf Brings Interior Design Online

Laurel & Wolf is an online interior design marketplace that connects customers and professional designers. Leura Fine, a pro designer and entrepreneur, started the company in 2014 with an eye to bring interior design into the digital age. She's certainly doing something right. The LA-based startup now has 20 employees, 650 designers using its platform and thousands of customers across the US and Canada. Investors have taken notice: Laurel & Wolf recently raised $4.4M in a Series A funding round led by Charles River Ventures, TechCrunch reported. In total, the company has raised $5.5M, with additional investments coming from Draper & Associates, Karlin Ventures and Upside Partnership. Fine was inspired by the shift she saw taking place in interior design thanks to the impact of web-sharing and e-commerce sites; but she realized that the industry itself had not evolved to reflect the digital marketplace. “There were all these issues around the way it works, because it’s been a very opaque business. So, this is something that really evolved out of me seeing a need in my own industry,” Fine says. She says Laurel & Wolf has made design more accessible to the average consumer. Customers pay a flat fee of $299 to receive digital style boards from professional designers who create personalized looks for a customer's home or office. Customers get a shopping list of items that match their design choices while staying within their specified budget. Laurel & Wolf receives 20% of the flat design fee and related revenue from online sales, since most customers buy off the site's list of affiliated providers. Its plans for the future include launching a mobile app and working with a third-party credit provider, to allow customers to finance purchases. [TECH]