Client testimonial

Nursery (baby room) remodel

United StatesMarch 31, 2013, 8:42 PM

“I learnt about ArcBazar whilst reading an article online about crowd-sourcing. For those of you who don’t know what ArcBazar is: it is a web site where you can sponsor a competition to design a space ( anything from a room to a whole building!). You describe what you want, choose what the prize money is and select a deadline when the competition ends. After the competition starts you will begin receiving submissions for your project.. Submissions usually include the 3D model file (Autocad, Archicad, Sketchup, etc), 3D renderings, elevations, photos and text describing the design. Submissions are from designers and architects from all over the world.
Most people don’t hire a designer when renovating their homes. The reason? Cost! Most designers will charge you 15% of your total renovation cost. If you are spending thousands of dollars, this equates to quite a bit of money. I’ve hired designers before with mixed success so when found out about ArcBazar I thought I would give it a try.
We recently renovated our office and baby room and sponsored competitions on ArcBazar to design both rooms. We chose to put $700 down to sponsor each competition. The web site fee is 15% so our total was $805 per competition. The more money you put, the more people are likely to participate in your competition and better people are likely to participate.
Wow were we impressed with what we got for our money! The office competition had 17 submissions and some submissions included 2 designs. In total about 25 designs were submitted for the office project alone! The designs were submitted by designers and architects from all over the world: Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, UK, US, India, Greece, Serbia, Armenia, Romania, Moldova, Egypt and Bangladesh. Not all designs were great but many were awesome! More than half were very good. I was sold! This is certainly the way to go. No designer I ever hired came close to the quality of work that we got out of ArcBazar. In fact, almost every design submitted was better than any design I ever got from hiring local designers.
Once the competition is over, it is your turn to pick the winners. First, second and third place get paid (60%, 30%, 10%). Everybody else does not. At this point the web site will give you the option of contacting the winner directly. I did. We wanted to make some changes to the winning design so we hired the winner to make those changes for us. That worked out really well too. We exchanged e-mails and described what we wanted changed.
The baby room project was also a success. Some 15 submissions from 9 designers. The winning design: beautiful! Truly awesome! We are very very happy with it.
Will I use ArcBazar again? ABSOLUTELY! I won’t even think twice about it? If I could go back in time, would I had done something different? Yes. I would put more money down. I am not kidding. I actually feel BAD ONLY paying $420 for the winning design (60% of $700). The girl did a wonderful job and deserved to be paid more.
PS: Construction is now over and the rooms look great.”