One of the most innovative things we saw at NeoCon 2019 this past June, on the first floor of theMART in Chicago, was Material Bank. Created by Adam Sandow, chairman and founder of the Sandow Media company, Material Bank bills itself as “the world’s largest material library created for the design industry.
Material Bank provides a solution to the long-archaic nature of how design firms go about searching for and specifying materials for their projects. The service, exclusively available to design professionals for free, enables designers from participating firms to order samples until midnight (EST) each day and guarantees those samples arrive by 10:30am the very next morning.”
From Material Bank press notes: “Adam and his team developed a proprietary design tray out of the SANDOW R&D Lab located in its NYC HQ that ships an average of five different brands per box in just one, in lieu of design samples sent individually and then discarded. Its unique multi-sample send is possible because of SANDOW’s 80,000 square foot, state of the art robotics facility in Memphis [within walking distance of the FedEx HQ] with Locus Robotics.”
Material Bank launched in beta in 2018 with 50 manufacturers onboard, and that number grew to 100 manufacturers at the service’s official launch in January 2019. Currently, 180 manufacturers are available to sample through Material Bank, and that number is projected to reach 250 by the end of 2019.
Last week, we interviewed Adam Sandow about how Material Bank started, how it works, and his aspirations for growing a service and tool that looks to change the architecture and design industry.
officeinsight (OI): What are the origins of the Material Bank idea?
Adam Sandow (AS): We’re very much in the architecture and design space through our media publications, but we really wanted to do more with our readers – do more than simply put out our magazines. We began to study where the pain points are for designers and architects, and we found a huge problem, a massive inefficiency around time. We found that interior designers spend 39% of their day searching for and sampling materials.
“Our focus was the designer. Designers have a time pressure that they’ve never had before. If we could build a tool that could give them back time, we would be doing something really valuable.”
OI: What are the components that go into running Material Bank?
AS: We knew we needed to make a simple way to search. We had to build a very, very large online database that would be an all-encompassing search of available materials.
But we knew the solution needed to be much more than just a website that simply aggregated tons of data. We put into place a robotics-powered logistics facility that would allow designers to search and order materials until midnight one day, and then put it on their desk by 10:30am the very next morning.
OI: How have you gotten the word out about Material Bank thus far, and what has the reception been like?
AS: We are the largest publisher of design magazines, with 120 different design issues each year. Interior Design magazine is almost 90 years old, and there’s a lot of trust there between us and manufacturers. We use our publications as a way to get the word out, and then a lot of our marketing has happened naturally through word-of-mouth. We’re not some new tech company out of the Valley, and we’ve seen that both designers and manufacturers have been very open to hearing what we have to say and open to embracing a new tool that we’ve invested heavily in.
From the manufacturer perspective, timing was on our side. A year or two earlier, manufacturers might have been much slower to respond to something like Material Bank because they didn’t yet have a sense of how the industry had already changed. But there’s no debate now that designers need to save time, that they need more time, and that design libraries as they existed before are disappearing.”
“Our goal is to be north of 500 manufacturers by the end of 2020. We add manufacturers almost every day, and we have a huge backlog of brands that want to be added. The amount of leads that Material Bank is generating for participating manufacturers is staggering. And we’re starting to see design firms mandating the use of Material Bank, because it does save so much time.”
OI: Currently, Material Bank has 9000 designer/architect users, and there is a huge waitlist of designers who want to be added to the service. What all goes into guaranteeing such a high level of service to designers, and all for free?
AS: “The reason for the waitlist of designers who’d like to be added to the service comes from a careful screening process Material Bank uses to ensure the integrity of it.
“If your firm has already been approved, you’ll be able to access the service. Some design firms haven’t been approved yet. We have many people from facility management, real estate companies, construction companies, and client companies directly, who want access, but this service is intended specifically for designers, and we want to make sure we can maintain this crazy level of service with our system. 1/3rd of our orders come in after 6p.m., and to be able to accept those orders and have their samples to them the next morning is an incredible service. We need to have a gate in place to make sure we’re accepting design firms that the service is really built for.”
OI: There’s a clear opportunity for Material Bank to make a positive environmental impact on the sampling process, and we know Material Bank hopes to prevent 10M material samples from ending up in landfills by the end of 2019. Can you share some additional sustainability metrics?
AS: We found that we can reduce the number of inbound boxes to a design firm by 75%, which has a great environmental impact. We’ve also commissioned a third-party study that found that 68% of Material Bank users say that Material Bank saves them over 50% of their day. That’s huge, and you can see why design firms are mandating that they use it.
OI: Material Bank will hold its first-floor space at theMART for one year, and has plans to design a similar permanent space in a new city as a laboratory for Material Bank to connect with designers and experiment with new technologies.