Design Samples Overnight: Material Bank

Changing how designers source materials.

Material Bank is a free online marketplace for design professionals to source material samples.

From Samples to Specification Management

Designers spend a large chunk of time discovering, specifying and sourcing materials. Even though we live in an increasingly digital world, design is still physical. Seeing materials online doesn’t replace physically touching, evaluating, and assembling them alongside other materials to create a cohesive pallet.

Before Material Bank, designers ordered samples from manufacturer websites. Packages would arrive, or not, at various times from all over the globe. With Material Bank, designers can select samples and get them delivered in a neat package overnight.

More Than a Material Bank

Material Bank began as a company for samples. In just a few years, they’ve built brand partnerships with giants like Herman Miller and Ann Sacks. They’ve acquired+100K active design members. And they’ve built out a digital workflow for designers to manage their project specs. They recently introduced a Pinterest-like feature called Boards. Now, designers can create visuals to share with stakeholders. Remember the days of copying and pasting images into InDesign to create presentation ready assets? (I do).

Keeping Green

Unused samples don’t go to landfill. They get sent back to Material Bank’s warehouse for distribution to other designers. Since it’s founding, Material Bank redistributed over +1M samples to other designers across America. They warehouse all their goods in their Mississippi warehouse, where they employ Locus Robotics to manage their supply chain.

Their latest round of funding pushed them to unicorn status 🦄. What might be next for Material Bank? Material procurement directly on their platform for builders, perhaps?