The Expert

Big news: The Expert has joined Havenly Brands! What we started as a consultation platform has evolved into a thriving trade marketplace serving designers across sourcing, procurement, and project execution. Over the past two years, our trade business has scaled rapidly, more than doubling in 2025 alone. Every day more and more designers are joining our community. This next chapter is about acceleration of that growth. By joining Havenly Brands, we gain operational scale and technology to continue building the most designer-first platform in the industry that is rooted in taste, powered by smarter workflows, and supported by best-in-class support. We’re building some exciting new features together, and are excited to share more soon. We appreciate our brand partners, trade members, and Experts, who saw our vision from the beginning and grew alongside us. Thank you to our investors, especially Hayley Bay Barna First Round Capital Nicole Johnson Forerunner, for believing in this vision and backing us along the way. And we're excited to work with the Havenly Brands (Havenly, Interior Define, Burrow, The Citizenry, The Inside, and St. Frank) team, led by Lee Mayer. Most of all, we’re deeply grateful to our team, past and present, and to our founders for building a brand with real cultural credibility, especially Lee Anne (Grant) Blake Leo SeigalJake Heddaeus Olivia Black Gabrielle Savoie Katie Davison Shannon Kitnick Anna Monahan Katy Cannon Kimberley Mizer Colin Brophy Austin Jones Brianna Anand Josefina Hamren Denah Rooks Grace Schoffman Jacquelyn (Jackie) Wilson Myles Grant Oto Ciulis Taryn Wenske Kat Larson As part of this transition, a few talented team members are exploring new roles. If you’re hiring in e-commerce, marketplaces, product, or operations, please comment on this post. More via Business of Home with Fred Nicolaus at https://lnkd.in/eqKBqGY6

🚀 AI Hackathon at The Expert 🚀 Last week, we hosted a company-wide AI hackathon. Each teammate came up with an idea and built their own AI-powered project. We saw demos that improved user-facing experiences, streamlined internal workflows, and opened up new ways of working with our partners. Everyone in the company participated, and the results showed that: 🏆 The winners were from logistics, merchandising and biz ops. 🥈 Runners-up came from sales, engineering, and marketing. What made this so meaningful is not just the tech, it’s the context we’re building in. Interior design is deeply creative, personal, and human. It’s about relationships, artistic vision, and in-person experiences. So when it comes to AI, we have to be thoughtful. It’s not about automation for automation’s sake, it’s about using technology intentionally to support the magic that makes this industry so special. We’re excited to build AI not just for ourselves, but for our partners (design firms and vendors) to help them work smarter, faster, and with more space for creativity. This week showed us what’s possible when everyone dedicates time to building something that matters, with AI as a tool not a salve. We’re proud to be shaping what an AI-native interior design company looks like, with craft, care, and creativity at the center. #AI #Hackathon #InteriorDesign #TheExpert #FutureOfWork #AIinDesign #TechAndCreativity #AItools