Having launched in January 2019 and introduced at NeoCon in June, Material Bank was heralded as a game changer for designers. I had the opportunity to see for myself on a visit to Chicago, and spent some time with a Material Bank specialist at theMart. What was most impressive were the features that were not immediately evident, the logic and precision with how the concept is executed behind the glossy interior of the Material Bank space. The hands-on experience was not only intuitive and fun to play with all the tools – it gave pause for a bit of nostalgia for the design libraries of the past. Any designer of a certain vintage will most likely have had the pleasure of being tasked with keeping their firm’s design library up to date, a job usually assigned early in one’s career!
We were able to connect with Adam Sandow, CEO of SANDOW in order to find out more on the development of the Material Bank concept and his assessment of how Material Bank is upending the specification process for the A&D community.
WDM: What was the a-ha moment to bring Material Bank to life?
Adam Sandow: SANDOW’s foundation may be in media, but we’ve built a robust, diversified business that includes tools, services, and solutions that complement our media properties.
After SANDOW acquired Interior Design and Material ConneXion and became fully immersed in the A&D industry, we noticed the massive inefficiencies of the sampling process. Designers were spending a ridiculous amount of time – up to 39 percent of their day searching for and ordering products and materials for their projects. We knew we could reinvent the process and we spent two years studying pain points in the industry from both the designer and manufacturer perspectives in order to build a solution. With Material Bank we have fundamentally changed the speed, process, and search capabilities that material specifiers experience when searching and sampling materials.
Adam is correct in his assessment of where the pain points lie in the materials and furniture specification process. This is especially true when there are limitations of time (based on design fee structure), and space (in design studios), and the time needed to keep a library up to date. Also issues around finding time to meet with product reps and manage the deluge of samples and catalogs can take a big bite out of a designer’s day. What Material Bank has done is to streamline the process with a platform that is easily accessible from multiple devices and allows the designer to play with colors and materials quickly and get the physical samples in short order (next day).
WDM: How did you socialize this to get manufacturers on board?
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Adam Sandow: As the publisher of the 87-year-old Interior Design magazine, we have deep relationships and existing credibility with manufacturers, giving us an open door to educate them how the platform would resolve so many of the industry’s inefficiencies. They understand the value proposition and recognized that Material Bank was going to change the industry. Every three days, a new manufacturer joins Material Bank. At this point, we have a backlog of companies who want to be on the platform, and we expect to have between 200 and 250 completely on-boarded by the end of the year.