Building Mortar Design — Project Management for Interior Designers
Challenge
Interior designers don't have a project-management problem — they have a communication and visibility problem. Generic PM tools like Asana, Monday, and Trello were built for software teams; the workflows and visual logic don't map to a design practice.
Clients don't grasp timelines until something's late, budget conversations happen reactively, procurement lives across email, spreadsheets, and DMs, and the presentation layer is disconnected from delivery.
Solution
Mortar is a visual workspace purpose-built for interior designers — phase management structured around how design projects actually run (discovery → concept → design development → procurement → installation), a client portal that keeps clients informed without learning a tool, budget and procurement tracking in one place, and a visual presentation layer for moodboards and materials connected to the project.
We designed the full interface in Figma with real designers before writing code; the data model is phase-aware.
Results
The client portal removed a whole category of designer-client anxiety by showing progress, upcoming decisions, and current spend. Mortar is in active development, onboarding early users.
Lessons: vertical SaaS needs patience with domain specifics; the procurement layer is where the real complexity lives; and designers adopt carefully, so the product must be immediately obvious.
Insights
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