E27’s writer, Joanna Yeo gets a quick interview with Ashley Choo and Norman Leong, the founders of up and coming home décor ideas site, Qeeple.

What is Qeeple & how does it work?

Qeeple is a home-grown online site for homeowners looking for interior design and home furnishing ideas. Launched quietly in July 2011, the site now hosts over 4,000 interior and furnishing images from 130 local design and architecture firms.

A portmanteau formed from the words ‘keep’ and ‘people’, Qeeple encourages users to keep the interiors and furnishing images that inspire them via a simple ‘drag and drop’ function. Users can then rearrange and organize images as well as input notes and comments in their qeepbooks, mood board-like layout application. Homeowners can share these qeepbooks to family, friends and design firms communicate their preferred home design styles.

This takes the messy offline act of browsing interior design magazines and tearing out pages with the design styles they like, online.

What I think about Qeeple

Ashley mentioned that there is an existing demand for an online informative site where homeowners can find relevant design information on furniture, flooring there and I can’t agree more. In this time of day, we ‘google’ almost everything under the sun for an answer.

Another thing I like about Qeeple is that the site focuses a lot on featuring local design talent in Singapore. This definitely spells good news as an avenue for local talents to showcase their creativity and market their design services as homeowners can get in touch with them via the contact information provided.

A suggestion for the website is to allow users to upload and share their own home décor images onto the site. This can come in the form of a new category like ‘Ideas inspired by you’ that allows existing homeowners to showcase their home design and inspire others. This gives a website where information is not only provided from the Qeeple team but also community-driven.

Photo: Qeeple

The team behind Qeeple

Qeeple, a homegrown web startup is made up of a three-person team consisting of co-founders, Ashley Choo and Norman Leong as well as Sam, the developer.

While doing a marketing and communications stint with the Interior Design Confederation (Singapore) in 2009, Ashley saw that the interior design industry seemed pretty backward in technology compared to other industries such as fashion, food and finance etc. Furthermore, there were also many great designers who are only documenting (or rather, hiding) their work with images in physical photo albums shown to walk-in customers. This spurred her on to start the company to use current technologies to add value to companies in the industry.

Seeing the potential in how Qeeple can be used to make available resources that were in great demand available to the public, Norman who was already helping Ashley from the start with sales, organisation and technology came onboard later.

Photo: Qeeple