In February this year, co-founder and CEO Rama Harinath told me that at Prolance they were mending the broken road between designers and furniture manufacturers. Now, with the launch of Prolance Interior Design Hub in Hyderabad last month, Harinath and his team have taken a step towards building a physical community space for designers
But there’s a difference. At Design Hub the customer is placed right at the centre beside the designer, with the entire production and material ecosystem all around.
Prolance Interior Design Hub is an interior design experience centre, which doubles as a coworking space for designers. More importantly, the designers can bring their clients here.
In this holistic space clients and professionals can discuss their design concepts, and touch-feel the materials and furniture on display, all with the view to closing the discussion and finalising the design.
On display are furniture fittings from Hafele, Hettich, Kessebohmer, and Ebco; laminates from Merino, wall coverings from Marshalls, kids’ furniture from Smartsters, lighting and automation from Wipro Home, and space-saving furniture from Invisible Bed. This is for starters. More brands and solutions are likely to be onboarded in the coming days.
Design Hub is an 11,500-sft facility located at Jubilee Hills and conceptualised to facilitate coworking. It includes the 4,500-sft experience centre, and private meeting and conference spaces that encourage collaboration and creativity.
Harinath says that Prolance is on a mission to empower freelance designers and studios with its technology platform and coworking spaces. “We plan to set up 20 such design hubs across the country so that interior designers and their customers can have more productive and creative discussions.”
The Prolance SaaS platform provides its users with the ability to feed their furniture designs direct to factories without any manual intervention. “Prolance enables designers to generate renders, bills of materials and cut lists in a jiffy. And with a growing network of small and medium-sized factories that are integrated into Prolance, they can get quick quotations and delivery schedules, something that was unheard of earlier.”
According to Harinath, leading furniture brands like Godrej Interio, Spacewood, Landmark, SquareYards, and Pepperfry are already using Prolance. “Together we are revolutionising the way the interior industry is working, cutting project costs by 20 per cent and delivery timelines by 40 per cent!”
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Interestingly, Prolance started in 2020 as a tech platform for designers, to enable them to seamlessly communicate their designs with furniture factories. It received $2 million in pre-Series A funding from marquee investors including Foudamental, Axilor, Arali Ventures and Force Ventures. It then evolved into a marketplace where designers, factories and material and component suppliers could discover each other.
With Design Hub, Harinth says that Prolance has brought the customer into the discussion, “completely democratising the entire design-to-manufacture-to-install journey.”
In April 2023 Prolance won the Business Innovation Award at India Kitchen Congress. This award recognises the innovation (process, technology, business model or idea) that has enabled the kitchen and cabinetry business to become efficient, competitive, and responsive to customer expectations.
