Built by a designer who needed it. Made for every creative mind that collects before it creates.
Ref. is a format-agnostic reference collector built around projects. Not a mood board. Not a file manager. Not another Pinterest. A place where you can dump a photo, a product link, a PDF spec, your own sketch, a song that captures a mood — all in one board, organized by project, shareable with a client in one tap.
01 — Where It Started
I believe interior design work never starts at a desk.
It starts in a showroom running your hand across a stone slab. In a market finding a fabric you've never seen before. In a restaurant noticing how the light hits a brass fixture at 7pm. In a museum standing in front of a painting that somehow captures exactly what your client is trying to feel in their home.
Now I'm a product designer. I think in systems, flows, and experiences. But I still take on interior projects. The small renovations. The personal work. The kind that reminds you why you fell in love with design in the first place.
And every single time — the same problem.
A material photographed in a showroom six months ago. A color saved somewhere I can't remember. A product link sent to myself at midnight. A song that captured the entire feeling of a space. A book cover that became a whole palette. Scattered across five apps, three devices, and my own memory.
Then one day, mid-conversation with a colleague, I said the words I've said a hundred times before.
"Send me a ref."
And I stopped.
02 — The Problem
Interior designers are trained to see the world differently. Every texture, every shadow, every material tells a story. But when it comes to capturing those moments, the chaos was real. And it was costing me.
I looked at how every designer I knew managed their references. The answers were almost identical every time.
"My camera roll mostly."
"I have a Pinterest board but I never really use it."
"I send links to myself."
"I have a folder somewhere but I can't find things."
"Honestly — everywhere and nowhere."
Nobody had a system they trusted. Nobody had a place they went to first. Everyone was managing the same chaos with the same broken workarounds.
03 — The Gap
I looked at every tool a designer might use and asked one question: can I dump everything here regardless of format? None of them said yes.
Pinterest — beautiful for images. Useless for specifications, sketches, or anything that isn't a photograph. Built for consumers, not working designers.
Houzz — too rigid. Locks you into their catalog rather than the real world of materials you collect yourself.
Notion — demands organization before capture. A designer on a site visit doesn't have time to set up a database. The friction kills the moment.
Dropbox / Google Drive — file storage, not idea storage. No visual context. No project flow.
Camera Roll — the most used tool in every designer's workflow. And the worst. No context, no project connection, no searchability. A graveyard of unnamed inspiration.
04 — The Solution
I stopped complaining about the missing tool and built it. A weekend, Claude, and a problem I'd lived for over a decade.
Ref. is built around three core beliefs:
Capture first, organize later. The moment you see something, saving it takes one tap. No folders to choose. No formats to think about. Just — save it, connect it to a project, move on. The app catches what your eye catches.
Everything lives in one place. A photo, a link, a PDF, a voice note, a color swatch, a sketch — Ref. holds all of it. No format is more important than another. Because to a designer, they never were.
The mess is yours. The presentation is theirs. Your board can be as chaotic as your creative mind needs it to be. When a client or contractor needs to see it — one tap turns it into something beautiful, clean, and shareable.
