Designer Case Study

Case study · Interior design studio In progress

Every piece lived in 5 places.
Now it lives on 1 line.

One sheet takes a job from the first call to an installed piece. She picks where a piece is, or types one number. The dates, prices and paperwork fill themselves in.

sheet for every house

steps from pick to installed

pick moves a whole scheme

things typed twice

The problem

The design was never the hard part. The paperwork around it was.

She's a working interior designer with a full book of houses. Every sofa, rug and lamp she specifies has a life after she picks it: shown to the client, approved, invoiced, paid, ordered, chased, delivered, installed.

That life was spread across a spreadsheet, a text thread with the client, a vendor's order email, QuickBooks and her own memory. Nothing was hard. But one piece touched 5 places, a house has dozens of pieces, and she has more than one house.

Dozens of pieces×5 places each=a job you can't see all at once

See it

Follow one rug from pick to installed.

First the old way, stop by stop. Then the same rug on The List.

Where it used to live 0 stops

▦

Her spreadsheet

✉

Text thread with the client

QuickBooks

☏

The vendor's order email

Her memory

The List 0 steps

IDPieceClient totalStatus AS-001Area Rug · Birch Lane$1,199Present to client ▾

Press Show me the way. The List plays second.

5 places, 14 stops by hand. 1 line, 7 steps, and she still sends every one.

Sample client, vendor and prices.

I created a presentation in 6 hours that would have taken me at least 3 days. The pricing system alone is a game-changer.

Interior designer, after her first client presentation on The List

Take the tour

What she sees, one step at a time.

A job from the first call to an installed piece, in about a minute. It plays by itself; use Back and Next to go to any step.

Placeholder studio name and made-up clients.

Who does what

Her taste. Its paperwork. Her yes.

She brings it

What only she knows.

Which rug, which vendor, what she paid. She types into a yellow cell or picks from a dropdown. That's her whole part.

The List does it

Everything after the pick.

The client price, figured her way every time. The page her client approves on. The invoice. The order chase. The grey cells work themselves out.

She keeps it

The yes.

Contracts stay drafts for her lawyer. QuickBooks invoices are made, never emailed. She sends every one.

An honest note. This one is still being built. The first part, a clear picture of what she actually makes on every piece, is done. The List rolls out house by house this fall.

I'll report hours and dollars after it has run through real installs, not before. Past her first presentation, what's on this page is what it does, not what it saved.

Your turn

Count the places one piece of your work has to live. That number is the problem.

Pick one thing you sell or deliver, then paste this into ChatGPT or Claude:

Here is one [product/project/order] from start to finish: [describe every step]. List every place its information lives along the way (spreadsheets, texts, email, accounting, my head). For each step, tell me what I retype from one place to another. Then tell me which single place could hold all of it.

Where does your work live right now?

If the answer is "5 places," let's talk about one.

Book your free 30-minute intro call

— Sarah

Every piece lived in 5 places.Now it lives on 1 line.