Modsy

» see modsy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You photographed your room and measured a couple of walls, then sent it in. What came back was a 3D model of that specific room, correct to the window placement, with furniture arranged in it by a human designer. Every object in the render was a real product you could buy, and you could swap any of it for something else and see the room again. That was Modsy, founded in 2015 by Shanna Tellerman, who had sold a games company to Autodesk and then spent time as an investor before building this.

The money followed the demo. Norwest put in $8 million and Advance Venture Partners $23 million, then TCV led a $37 million round that brought the total to $70.75 million. The press release for that round billed the company as transforming the future of home design and furniture shopping.

On 29 June 2022 both Fortune and TechCrunch reported that Modsy had stopped offering design services and parted ways with its designers. Orders in progress stopped mid-project. The company itself ceased operations on 6 July and laid off everyone, and the chief executive gave TechCrunch the reason in six words: capital constraints and uncertain market conditions.

~ the record ~

~ what the renders were for ~

Interior design as a service had been tried before and kept failing on the same arithmetic: a designer's hours cost more than the margin on the furniture. Modsy's bet was that the modeling work could be automated enough to leave a thin layer of human taste on top, and that the furniture commission would cover the rest. The render was the marketing and the product at once, because seeing your own room with a different sofa in it is a more persuasive thing than any catalog photograph.

The weak joint was always the furniture itself. The company did not hold the inventory, so a finished project turned into a set of orders at other people's stores, on other people's lead times, with Modsy's name on the experience and none of the delivery under its control. When it closed, the orders that were still open were open at those stores, so the shutdown reached people as a missing sofa before it reached them as a missing website.

~ 6 july 2022 ~

Two separate things ended about a week apart. The design business closed in late June and the trade press covered that. The company stopped existing on 6 July, which only became clear afterward, and the gap between those dates is where the customers were.

Modsy returned some of the design service charges and told people who were owed money for furniture to complete a form. TechCrunch went back to the story on 17 July and found customers who had filled in that form and heard nothing, more than two weeks on. The company had by then deleted its Twitter and Facebook accounts and made its Instagram private, so the people waiting for refunds had no public channel left to ask in.

~ the second half ~

Tellerman said the assets had been acquired by a new entity and that customers would be told how their needs would be addressed. Nothing has appeared publicly under the Modsy name since, and the site that remained was a brochure with nothing behind it.

The archive shows the collapse in bytes. The homepage was 39,350 bytes on 5 June 2022 and 20,914 bytes on 1 July, having lost half of itself in the weeks when the designers were let go. It then sat there answering requests, between 18 and 29 KB, all through 2023, long after anybody was left to answer them.

Today the apex answers nothing, with or without the www and on either scheme. The renders people had paid for were delivered through a viewer on that host, the version where you could swap a chair and look again, and that half of the work had exactly the lifespan of the DNS record.

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