Schumacher Bought Homepolish. Here’s What They’re Going To Do With It
Original article posted at Business of Home by Kaitlin Petersen.
Earlier this year, F. Schumacher & Co. quietly acquired the digital assets of erstwhile online design platform Homepolish, which went under in September 2019. This morning, the company launched a new website (and rebranded Homepolish’s social media accounts as @JoinFreddie) to announce the debut of Freddie, a to-be-developed membership community for interior designers that aims to amplify the to-the-trade industry by encouraging consumers to engage with decorators. (The name is a playful nod to Frederic Schumacher, who founded the New York–based design house in 1889.)
The new brand’s development has been spearheaded by Schumacher president and CEO Timur Yumusaklar and creative director Dara Caponigro, along with Stephen Puschel, the fifth-generation owner of F. Schumacher & Co., which includes Schumacher and rug and carpet brand Patterson Flynn Martin. The three also brought on Homepolish founder Noa Santos as an adviser to help shape Freddie around Homepolish’s original purpose while offering guidance on how to sidestep some of the challenges his company faced.
“I still very much believe in what we were doing with Homepolish—the mission of helping designers build their business by helping them find clients,” Santos tells Business of Home. “I also want to make sure that Freddie is set up for as much success as possible, and that it is not falling into the same potholes that [Homepolish] might have fallen in over the years—[because] I’m intimately familiar with those potholes.”
Founded in 2012 by Santos and early Buzzfeed employee Will Nathan, Homepolish offered designers a steady stream of leads, marketing muscle, and back-office support. In exchange, the company kept a percentage of the designers’ hourly rates. At the time, its approach—especially its embrace of clear pricing and entry-level budgets—was revelatory in an industry that largely chases only the biggest projects. For several years, it worked well: Designers built healthy businesses with Homepolish’s leads, and clients were happy. But by 2016, facing mounting competition from well-funded online competitors that had entered the scene, the company announced a $20 million round of funding. The resulting pressure to turn a profit, fast, led the company to implement unpopular features—an unwieldy project management tool designers had little incentive to use, a hastily built platform matching clients with contractors, and a more restrictive contract structure. Running low on cash, Santos looked to raise another round of funding to keep the company afloat, but a deal never materialized and Homepolish shuttered dramatically last fall, leaving many designers owed thousands of dollars for their work.
In the aftermath of Homepolish’s collapse, Santos went looking for the right buyer for the company’s most valuable assets—an Instagram account with 1.8 million followers, a robust presence on Pinterest, and email newsletter lists reaching both designers and consumers. (A Marker story in February suggested that one early model he considered was a subscription service where designers and clients pay to be matched.) Once the partnership with Schumacher was secured, Freddie was developed throughout the spring and summer, in part in reaction to the dramatic ways COVID has reshaped consumer thinking.
Santos says that ultimately, Freddie’s goal isn’t just to get jobs for designers, but rather to help reframe the way designers are perceived in the culture of home. “If you just see a designer as just an avenue to get a sofa, there’s not a lot [of opportunity] there in the long run, because technology will supplant it,” he says. “But if you see a designer like an artist or a therapist—there’s a reason why they haven’t been replaced by software. Away doesn’t sell luggage, they sell the promise of travel. I think the conversation in the industry needs to move from design being a functional and aesthetic exercise to it being a life experience.”