Pricing Transparency Through Technology
Anyone who has worked in interior design, architecture, or product design will be familiar with the gap between a design on paper and what ends up getting built. Custom elements — unusual materials, non-standard forms, details that push beyond the everyday — are often difficult for project teams to cost accurately, particularly when they haven't encountered that kind of work before. Without a clear picture of how something is made or installed, the natural response is to price conservatively. Risk has a cost, and uncertainty tends to inflate it.
The result is that considered, carefully designed work can get value-engineered out of a project before it's ever properly evaluated. Not because it was too expensive, but because it was too unknown.
It's one of the things we most wanted to do something about.
The Gap Between Design and Cost
Custom work has historically been difficult to price early in a project. A designer or architect might spend weeks developing a concept, only to find out late in the process that a key element is over budget — or worse, that it was assumed to be over budget without anyone actually checking.
That gap between design intent and accurate costing is where a lot of good work gets lost. And it's a gap that technology is well placed to close.
Building Tools That Work for Designers
Over the past few years we've been building configuration software that connects directly to our in-house manufacturing processes. The goal is simple: give designers and architects real-time pricing for custom work, early enough in the process to actually influence decisions.
The tools let you adjust materials, dimensions, and details and see how each choice affects the final cost as you go. Rather than waiting for a quote, you can explore the design space with cost as part of the conversation from the beginning.
This matters because it changes what's possible. When cost is visible and responsive, design decisions can be made with confidence. Elements don't have to be cut speculatively — they can be evaluated on their actual merits.
Designed for Installation, Not Just Production
Reducing uncertainty doesn't stop at the price. A significant part of what makes custom work feel risky for project teams is not knowing how something goes together on site.
We design with installation in mind from the start, and we provide detailed installation guides alongside our products. For builders and joiners working with our systems for the first time, that documentation removes a lot of the guesswork — and with less guesswork comes more accurate pricing, fewer contingencies, and smoother projects overall. It's another way of giving everyone in the process the information they need to make good decisions.
Accurate Costing as a Design Tool
We think of these configurators not just as quoting tools, but as part of the design process itself. Understanding the cost implications of a material choice or a dimensional change in real time gives designers more agency, not less. It's the difference between working within constraints and understanding them.
Our manufacturing processes are set up for this kind of flexibility — that's what agile manufacturing means in practice. The software is built to reflect that, so the pricing it generates is grounded in how we actually make things, not in conservative estimates designed to cover unknowns.
We're Just Getting Started
We'll be straightforward: this is a journey we're at the beginning of. The tools we've built so far are focused on our wall panel and menu board systems, and we're continuing to develop them. There's a lot more we want to make possible.
But the direction is clear. We believe that when designers and architects have access to accurate, real-time costing for custom work, better design makes it into the world. That's worth building for.
Want to try our configuration tools? Explore the FOLD configurator or get in touch to discuss a custom project.
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