Designing your dream home isn’t often a streamlined procedure, it involves too many middle men, time delays and what you visualise might not be what you get. Livspace, a home interiors and renovation platform, with its unique design automation platform connecting consumers, designers and sellers under one roof, promises to minimise that gap. Enabling 3D virtualisation of interiors to the designers and offering the consumer a choice of over a four million products from sellers across the country, the consumer here has a hold of colour, style, budget and material, he/she wants for their house. In tune with the emergence of experience centres, Livspace also gives them an option to feel their select products physically as well.
As the startup that is functional in NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru is set to enter Hyderabad, Ramakant Sharma, co-founder of the platform tells us what to expect of it. Equating this with Uber in terms of interior design, he says the customer decides the requirement as per which the sellers and the designers act accordingly. It’s the technology that makes a difference here. He adds, “The problem with most designing tools is they don’t facilitate inter-operability, the 2D models can’t often be used in the other software. Besides, they are very expensive and piracy is rampant. This is an all-in-one tool that does finance management, project management, visualisation and comprises an integrated catalogue of many products.” Interestingly, even if the sellers don’t have a 3D model of these objects, the platform creators request for pictures from different angles and create a 3D model for them.
Once the customer requirement is met and the design is agreed upon, they get connected to designers of closest proximity.” Like an e-commerce platform, the products are all in the warehouse, but to get a feel of the products, a customer can visit our experience centre. Once the lead is generated, the consumer and the designer are meeting regularly, deciding what to take from the catalogue of 3D models.”
What differentiates Livspace from other similar platforms is the transparency at each step, from price to delivery time to intimation of progress. Livspace design professionals go through a lot of portfolio checks, references before they’re brought on-board. Their online platform has a Whatsapp-like messenger feature for regular communication with the designers. Looking ahead, their target is to make this a completely virtual solution, where offline communication can be avoided. “We have all the features to do that. Communication and visualisation, the trust-given the heavy amounts involved, are bottlenecks we’ve to go past,” he signs off.
