Sourcing, proposal and invoicing automation for an interior design firm
Live product sourcing, automated proposals and invoicing, and AI-triaged client email — with designer taste still making every final call.
- Sector
- Interior design
- ARR
- $12M ARR
- FTE
- 20 FTE
- Harness
- Claude
“Interior design founders and executives are typically not technical, and I didn't have much experience working with software engineers either. Because the creative part of our work can't simply be outsourced to AI, I was quite skeptical coming into the engagement.
But once I understood that AI could be a tool to augment my creative and client-facing work—and automate the workflows that take up time but don't require my creativity—we leaned in hard. It has transformed the entire company.
Our gross margin has increased, and our response time to customers and prospects has improved dramatically. We can now get proposals back to prospects much faster, which helps us build trust more quickly. Our close rate has also gone up because prospects are no longer shopping around while waiting for a proposal—we can often get one to them within half an hour of our meeting.
It's been a game changer.”
The problem
This interior design firm's business ran on two things that resist automation: taste, and the sheer manual effort of building proposals. Every project meant sourcing hard-to-find furniture and decor to match a client's aesthetic, building a proposal with all of it priced and marked up, turning that into an invoice broken out by line item and labor hours, and managing the back-and-forth communication with the client throughout — all largely by hand.
The solution
Eclipse built the firm a system that keeps the designers' taste and final judgment in the loop while automating everything around it. Live web data tools now search for the specific, hard-to-find products a project calls for, checking real availability rather than relying on a static catalog, with the designer still making the final call on what makes the cut. Once a proposal is built, product images and pricing, including the firm's markup, populate automatically, and that same data flows straight into an invoice broken down by line item, covering both product and design hours. Client communication runs the same way: drafts for outbound correspondence sit ready in Gmail, and inbound email gets triaged and prioritized using the full context of each client's proposal and meeting history, with a first-draft response already written. On top of that, Eclipse built an outbound go-to-market agent that finds new prospective clients based on the profile of people who've worked with interior designers before.
The impact
Proposal and invoice creation, sourcing, and client correspondence are now semi-automated end to end, freeing the designers to spend their time on the creative decisions that actually need a human, rather than the paperwork and searching around them.