The work behind a room.
A design studio’s output is visual. Much of the work behind it lives in spreadsheets, vendor documents and inboxes. At Marais Home, we built tools for that part of the business.
The setting
A shop, a studio,
and a lot of handoffs.
Marais Home is a retail shop and interior design studio in Lexington, Kentucky. Katie leads design; Chris runs operations. This is work inside our own business, not an independent client engagement.
The same product information appears in a design schedule, a client quote, a vendor order and a delivery sheet. Each stage adds decisions: which finish, how many, what price, which room, what has actually shipped.
We approached those handoffs as specific workflows. Some needed AI to prepare inconsistent information. Others needed structured records, calculation code or a reliable document template.
01 / Quoting
From a spreadsheet to a document a client can read.
The working spreadsheet flow lets a designer upload an Excel workbook in ChatGPT and receive a branded, room-by-room PDF. The generator reads structured line items, groups them by room and calculates totals in code. The template controls the document’s layout.
This keeps arithmetic out of free-form model output. It does not remove the need to confirm quantities, current prices, specifications, allowances and the final client document.
Selections by room
Products, quantities, specifications and approved prices in structured rows.
Rules and review
Code computes totals. Missing information and exceptions need attention.
A consistent quote
A branded document organized around the rooms in the project.
Explore a fictional worked example and download the preparation workbook ↗
02 / Vendor information
The rules matter
as much as the model.
Vendor files do not all mean the same thing. A listed price may be retail or wholesale. Product identifiers, image sources, stock and shipping settings can vary by supplier.
At Marais, AI-assisted intake prepares Shopify product information using documented vendor rules. Descriptions, SKUs, images and prices are checked against source information before publication. Ambiguous values need verification, not a plausible guess.
The reusable asset is the written understanding of each vendor. It makes the next intake easier to review and reduces the need to rediscover the same conventions.
03 / Orders and documents
Keep the evidence
with the status.
An internal order-tracking workflow brings vendor and shipment updates together with project records. Human overrides preserve reviewed status decisions, and unresolved matches are flagged rather than treated as confirmed progress.
A vendor acknowledgement is different from a shipping notice. A shipping notice is different from proof of delivery. That distinction determines which updates can support a change in status.
Separate document tools generate purchase orders, shipping manifests and delivery sheets from structured data. These are working tools around the order, not a claim that every step runs through one unattended system.
Scheduled refreshes have also encountered authentication failures. Freshness checks and a manual review path are part of making the information useful.
04 / The next layer
A shared schedule.
A clear boundary.
A newer design-schedule tool has deployed features for room and item organization, product photos, client option selection, confirmation records and vendor purchase-order PDFs. Client-facing output excludes internal costs, margins and designer notes.
Its full real-project pilot remains unfinished. A client confirming selections is separate from formal order approval, and exporting a purchase-order PDF does not send or place a purchase. Broader integrations are separate rollout work.
We use that distinction when scoping client work too: a tested component, a deployed feature and a completed operational workflow are different milestones.
What carries over to another studio
Start with the information you repeat.
Identify the fields copied across documents, the rules used to calculate and check them, and the person responsible for the next decision. Then choose a bounded workflow to improve and test it with the team.
There is no measured revenue or time-savings claim attached to this case study. The evidence is the work itself: structured quoting, repeatable vendor intake, order review and document generation.
How we help interior design firms ↗Practical reading
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