Meet Houzz Pro Mood Boards
This new tool empowers designers to save product information easily and share your vision with clients
Sharing design ideas with clients and leads in a way they can easily understand is an important part of being an effective designer. Houzz has introduced new visual tools to make this part of your job easier.
Houzz Pro Mood Boards allows you to share products, colours and inspiration photos with current and prospective clients. Products can be added to mood boards directly from the Houzz Pro Product Clipper tool, which captures and stores product images and information from Houzz or other websites, or uploaded from a computer. Include any paint colour swatch in your mood board without having to search for it online. Pros can edit product images within each mood board to remove the background, layer products on top of each other and present the room with a 3D perspective to offer a comprehensive look of how the space will come together.
Houzz Pro Mood Boards allows you to share products, colours and inspiration photos with current and prospective clients. Products can be added to mood boards directly from the Houzz Pro Product Clipper tool, which captures and stores product images and information from Houzz or other websites, or uploaded from a computer. Include any paint colour swatch in your mood board without having to search for it online. Pros can edit product images within each mood board to remove the background, layer products on top of each other and present the room with a 3D perspective to offer a comprehensive look of how the space will come together.
Houzz head of visual technologies, Sally Huang, led the team – composed of engineers, artists, and computer graphics and computer vision specialists – that built the Houzz Pro Mood Boards tool. We sat down with Huang to find out more about this new tool.
Q. Why did the team create Houzz Pro Mood Boards?
A. We talk to a lot of interior designers and other pros on Houzz. And based on what they say, we try to come up with ways to make their lives much easier. One way to do this is to take the shared information from all of the different, disparate tools that design pros use and tie it all together.
Find, network with and browse the work of other professionals on Houzz
A. We talk to a lot of interior designers and other pros on Houzz. And based on what they say, we try to come up with ways to make their lives much easier. One way to do this is to take the shared information from all of the different, disparate tools that design pros use and tie it all together.
Find, network with and browse the work of other professionals on Houzz
You can adjust products such as rugs within Houzz Pro Mood Boards for a realistic look.
The big thing that we realised was that what makes a mood board tool really powerful is the ability to attach product information to it. So instead of creating your mood board in PowerPoint slides and then having to retype product information on a spreadsheet and keep track of every single product and link, you can do this all in one place with Houzz Pro Mood Boards.
When you use the Product Clipper in Houzz Pro to save a product from anywhere on the web, it captures all the product information for you. So you can source a bunch of products, use them in a mood board and share it with your clients. Once the design is more developed, you can share the specific products with clients to approve or reject each item individually.
You can also choose from thousands of paint colours and place paint swatches in a mood board.
The big thing that we realised was that what makes a mood board tool really powerful is the ability to attach product information to it. So instead of creating your mood board in PowerPoint slides and then having to retype product information on a spreadsheet and keep track of every single product and link, you can do this all in one place with Houzz Pro Mood Boards.
When you use the Product Clipper in Houzz Pro to save a product from anywhere on the web, it captures all the product information for you. So you can source a bunch of products, use them in a mood board and share it with your clients. Once the design is more developed, you can share the specific products with clients to approve or reject each item individually.
You can also choose from thousands of paint colours and place paint swatches in a mood board.
Q. Does the mood board have Houzz Pro branding?
A. No, this is about helping our pros run their businesses. Pros can add their firm’s branding, including its logo, to the mood boards they create in Houzz Pro with just one click.
A. No, this is about helping our pros run their businesses. Pros can add their firm’s branding, including its logo, to the mood boards they create in Houzz Pro with just one click.
Q. What other features are included with the Houzz Pro Mood Boards?
A. One really exciting element is our collaboration with Benjamin Moore in the US, which gives designers access to the popular line of paint colours [which are also available here]. Designers can showcase Benjamin Moore paint swatches in their mood boards or use them as the background colour for the mood board.
Also, Houzz Pro Mood Boards has a powerful background removal tool. You can use it on any product you save from around the web. That way, you can show your clients just that product on your mood board, without the surrounding background from the original image.
And floor plans made with the Houzz Pro 3D Floor Planner can be added to the mood board and will automatically update when they are edited.
Q. Why do you choose to work on Houzz Pro?
A. There’s a lot of competition for best-in-class software in the market today, targeting big architectural firms and a very broad audience. You end up building software with a million features that is expensive and built for big firms rather than individuals and small businesses – which is what most home design and renovation firms actually are.
To me, there was so much untapped opportunity to solve problems for a unique group of people: home design and renovation pros. In fact, we’ve built tools for the design community, and others for builders and renovators. Once you get to that specificity, it’s really powerful and very exciting. It’s geared toward real-life problems that people running design and renovation businesses have. We can solve some problems better for those groups of people.
Q. Do you use Houzz yourself outside of work?
A. Yes! I’ve actually renovated two apartments since joining Houzz. And of course I hired pros from Houzz for both of those projects.
Want to use Houzz Pro Mood Boards? Start a free trial
Your turn
Which aspects of Houzz Pro do you find helpful? Tell us in the Comments below, like this story and join the conversation.
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Want more practical information to help run your business? Read Houzz’s stories for pros here
A. One really exciting element is our collaboration with Benjamin Moore in the US, which gives designers access to the popular line of paint colours [which are also available here]. Designers can showcase Benjamin Moore paint swatches in their mood boards or use them as the background colour for the mood board.
Also, Houzz Pro Mood Boards has a powerful background removal tool. You can use it on any product you save from around the web. That way, you can show your clients just that product on your mood board, without the surrounding background from the original image.
And floor plans made with the Houzz Pro 3D Floor Planner can be added to the mood board and will automatically update when they are edited.
Q. Why do you choose to work on Houzz Pro?
A. There’s a lot of competition for best-in-class software in the market today, targeting big architectural firms and a very broad audience. You end up building software with a million features that is expensive and built for big firms rather than individuals and small businesses – which is what most home design and renovation firms actually are.
To me, there was so much untapped opportunity to solve problems for a unique group of people: home design and renovation pros. In fact, we’ve built tools for the design community, and others for builders and renovators. Once you get to that specificity, it’s really powerful and very exciting. It’s geared toward real-life problems that people running design and renovation businesses have. We can solve some problems better for those groups of people.
Q. Do you use Houzz yourself outside of work?
A. Yes! I’ve actually renovated two apartments since joining Houzz. And of course I hired pros from Houzz for both of those projects.
Want to use Houzz Pro Mood Boards? Start a free trial
Your turn
Which aspects of Houzz Pro do you find helpful? Tell us in the Comments below, like this story and join the conversation.
More
Want more practical information to help run your business? Read Houzz’s stories for pros here