Making the Switch to Design Manager
Original article posted on Design Manager.
Gordon Kessler worked at Ethan Allen for 18 years before he launched Gordon and Johnson Design Firm with his partner Larry Johnson in 2014. He says that experience shaped him into someone who is always seeking growth and improvement.
“In every project, we are looking to grow the level of design, the level of service, the level of preparedness, the speed, the efficiency,” Gordon says. “We want every single job we’re doing to come out better than the last one, and that means embracing a lot of new things all the time.”
One of the new things Gordon, Larry, and his team have embraced is Design Manager. Unhappy with their previous software, Gordon and Johnson made the switch in December of last year.
Prior to using Design Manager, Gordon and Johnson used a different interior design software, but it didn’t fit all of their needs.
“I was never very happy with it because there’s nothing intuitive about it,” he says. As someone who came from using corporate legacy systems, Gordon wanted a product that was more user-friendly, but still specific to the interior design business.
It was Larry that first heard of Design Manager through one of the many industry Facebook groups he is a part of. “I had been looking for something for a long time, and Design Manager came up as one of the primary options to use if you plan on opening a retail location, which is something that is perhaps a distant plan for us,” Larry says. “We didn’t want to have to change things again.”
After meeting with the Design Manager team at High Point Market in the fall and speaking to fellow business owners who had also migrated from other platforms, both partners felt confident in making the switch. What really sealed the deal in his mind, however, was the acquisition of Design Manager by the e-commerce company 1stdibs.
“Having somebody who comes from a tech background invest in this company and want to make it the best it can be, that was important to me,” Gordon says. “Even seeing the upgrades that were made to Design Manager in 2019 alone, those things were huge, and the improvements work.”