Featured on this episode:

• Find out more about Fiona by connecting with her on IG @designspec and @designmanager and LinkedIn at Designspec and Designmanager  
• Join The Designers Edge here
• Grab Your Free Script Guide here
• Access the full video interview with Elana Steele of Steele Appliance here

What you will learn from this episode:

• Why your specs are where projects win or fall apart
• How DesignSpec and Design Manager work and who they’re actually built for
• Why relationships are still the most important currency in this industry

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There’s a specific kind of frustration that only designers who have lived inside this industry truly understand.

It’s not just the 47 open browser tabs. It’s not just the discontinued fabric you fell in love with three weeks ago. It’s the moment you realize that the systems you’re working with, the tools you’re supposed to be running your business through, were not built by anyone who has ever actually done what you do.

Fiona Sanipelli reached that moment after years of managing hospitality design projects in New York, wrestling with spec software cobbled together in Microsoft Access, exporting Excel files that scrambled every thumbnail image before they hit the client’s inbox, and watching world-renowned firms use DOS-era tools to manage multi-million dollar hotel projects.

So she and her brother built something better.

That became DesignSpec, now acquired and operating alongside its sister company, Design Manager, under the same umbrella. Fiona joined me for a conversation about her winding path through this industry, what she learned building a software company from scratch, and why your specs are either saving your projects or quietly costing you.

From Winnipeg to New York to an Entirely Different Career

Fiona studied architecture at the University of Manitoba and went straight from school into designing restaurants as a solopreneur in Winnipeg. Her first client was a restaurateur named Jimmy the Greek — a local legend with a turtleneck, a gold chain, and absolutely no patience for nonsense. She managed to get on his good side. It was a fitting start.

Those early years were exactly the kind of education you can’t get in a classroom. Every day was a site visit. She drew on walls, changed things in real time, learned the hard way what a server station flow actually requires, and why clearances matter more than aesthetics when a restaurant is running at full capacity. School had given her design theory. The job sites gave her everything else.

After a few years, she got the itch to grow. A connection through a furniture fabricator landed her an introduction to AvroKO in New York, one of the most celebrated hospitality design firms in the world. She did a one-week internship, was immediately blown away by the level of creativity, and eventually moved to New York full-time.

She arrived at twenty-six, confident she knew what she was doing.

She did not know how to write a spec.

The Spec Problem Nobody Was Solving

At AvroKO, Fiona learned spec writing on a custom, in-house Microsoft Access system that crashed constantly and required hours of manual labor to produce anything usable. Later, at another world-renowned hospitality firm, she found herself managing specs for hotel lobbies with multiple sofas and banquettes, each with its own fabric selections, three sizes of throw pillows, and every pillow in a different fabric or leather. All of it tracked in Excel. All of it exported into scrambled thumbnail images that then went directly to clients.

She eventually landed at a firm that had switched to a legacy desktop system built in the nineties.

That was when she took screenshots of what she was using and sent them to her brother Graham, a software developer still living in Winnipeg.

Can we build something better?

Graham, who had been building computers for fun since ninth grade, looked at what a world-renowned design firm was relying on and couldn’t stop himself. They started conceptualizing DesignSpec around 2014. Graham spent two years just building the base architecture, determined to make it fully cloud-based and endlessly customizable so that any designer could build templates and spec types that fit their actual workflow, not a generic version of it.

While he built, Fiona taught. She walked him through the specific oddities of how this industry actually operates, the layers of a custom sofa spec, the linked throw pillow fabrics, the way a single product can appear in multiple areas of the same project with different quantities, the way an outsider would never guess that a beautiful material board represents weeks of vetting slip resistance ratings, grout selections, in-stock availability, and budget constraints all at once.

That gap between what design looks like from the outside and what it actually requires on the inside is exactly why the software needed to be built by someone who had lived it.

Why Your Specs Are Where Projects Win or Fall Apart

One of the most honest things Fiona said in our conversation was this:

Our projects fail or succeed on the accuracy of our specs.

And she’s right. An outsider looking at a presentation board sees fabrics, finishes, and tile. What they don’t see is everything that had to be true for those selections to actually work. The tile had to have the right slip resistance. The grout had to be specified. The fabric had to be cleanable, in stock, and on budget. The wood finish had to be achievable with the actual product available.

When designers build the pretty without building the technical foundation underneath it, they find out too late. Usually mid-project. Usually expensively.

Fiona described the pattern she saw repeatedly: designers presenting Pinterest-level boards built from images sourced online, then going to actually procure those items, only to discover they’re discontinued, they never existed as a real product, or they’re ten thousand dollars a yard. At that point, you’re not just starting over on selections. You’re starting over with a client who has already fallen in love with something you can’t deliver.

Good specs prevent that. They turn a beautiful concept into something buildable, sourceable, and real.

What DesignSpec and Design Manager Actually Do

For designers who aren’t familiar, here’s how Fiona explained the distinction between the two platforms.

DesignSpec is built for specification management. You go through tabs, spec types are pre-loaded, reports are ready to generate, and you build out the technical documentation for everything your project requires. For a simple residential kitchen, you’re in and creating a tile spec in under a minute. For a hotel lobby with linked upholstery, throw pillows, and fabric specifications across multiple areas, the system handles the complexity without requiring you to manage it manually across a hundred Excel columns.

It also saves designers roughly four to five hours per week, which, over the course of a year, is not a small number.

Design Manager is the financial and operational backbone: time tracking, purchase orders, invoicing, procurement records, and tax documents. Fiona described it as essentially replacing QuickBooks for designers who want everything in one place. Some firms even have their accountants work directly in the system.

The two platforms currently operate separately, though integration is something the team is working toward. For designers already committed to one legacy system, DesignSpec can run alongside it as a dedicated spec tool without requiring a wholesale overhaul of existing processes.

Both offer free trials. Both have customer support teams that, by Fiona’s account, are genuinely extraordinary, the kind of people who know the system better than almost anyone and treat users like part of the family.

Who DesignSpec and Design Manager are Actually For

One of the most common things Fiona hears from solopreneurs is that they don’t need something this robust. They’re working alone. They don’t have a team to coordinate specs across.

Her answer is worth hearing: the software isn’t just a coordination tool. It’s a structure. It prompts you to expedite. It reminds you to check stock. It keeps everything in one place rather than scattered across folders, screenshots, and forty open browser tabs. For designers who came up learning the back office from scratch, which is most of them, the software functions almost like having someone build the system for you. You just have to maintain it.

There’s also a flexible pricing structure that scales with your team size. You add users when you need them and remove them when a project wraps up, paying only for what you’re actually using. You can even put your account on hold during slow periods. For a solopreneur managing project cycles with varying bandwidth, that kind of flexibility matters.

On AI and What’s Actually Coming

We also talked about AI, because it’s impossible not to.

Both Fiona and I have been in this industry long enough to have lived through technology shifts that everyone was certain would change everything. We both remember CAD. We both watched it transform drafting without eliminating the need for designers. We’re both skeptical of the idea that AI will simply replace what we do.

What Fiona sees coming from the DesignSpec side is more targeted. The immediate focus is on making spec creation faster — moving from a web clipper plug-in that captures product information from vendor sites toward a version where you paste a product hyperlink and the system auto-populates the spec. It’s a practical, specific improvement that saves time without removing the designer from the process.

The longer-term possibility she’s most excited about is a deeper Revit integration. DesignSpec already syncs with Revit bidirectionally; update a spec in one system, and it pulls through to the other. What’s on the horizon is the ability to use AI to pull spec data directly into full construction document sets, reducing the manual tagging work that currently gets outsourced overseas because it’s so labor intensive. That’s not here yet, but the people working on it are serious, and Fiona has met with some of them.

Her position on all of it mirrors mine: AI needs people who actually know this industry to build it correctly. A tool built without that context creates unbuildable job sites and wrong specs. The oversight isn’t optional.

Relationships Are Still the Foundation

Before we wrapped up, we spent time on something that doesn’t get talked about enough in the context of building a design business: relationships.

Fiona built her entire client base for DesignSpec on the network she had accumulated moving through firms. The people she worked with at AvroKO, at Martin Brudnizki, and at Dutch East went out and started their own businesses, and they brought the software with them. New designers at those firms picked it up, switched jobs, and brought it to their next office. Fiona barely had to sell it. The relationships did that work.

When she started Handwerk with her husband, they landed their best client ever through a realtor connection, a busy businessman who hired two other designers to view an apartment and both of them didn’t show up. Fiona showed up. That’s it. That’s the whole story. He became their most significant client by a wide margin.

Her advice aligns with mine: for designers trying to build their network, reach out honestly. Tell people you’re looking for work or looking to connect. Start with realtors — they have the lists, they know the clients, and they genuinely want a designer they can trust to refer. Then move to builders, who almost universally wish they had a designer they could send clients to instead of doing it themselves.

Don’t assume someone already has a designer they love. And don’t let fear of rejection be the reason you never ask.

What to Take Away

Three things stand out from this conversation:

First, your specs matter more than most designers treat them. A beautiful presentation board is a starting point. The specs behind it are what determine whether that vision actually becomes a project.

Second, relationships are the foundation of everything in this industry. Every designer, vendor, contractor, and realtor you invest in genuinely is building something for later, even when it doesn’t feel that way yet.

And third, the right software isn’t a luxury. Its structure. It’s time. And for many designers, it’s the difference between finishing a project with a clear picture of where the money went and wondering how it all got away from them.

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Like this Episode?

Be sure to check out Episode #136: Unpacking What Project Specifications Are Needed On a Job

Be sure to check out Episode #158: How to Build a Supportive Network in Construction Management

Be sure to check out Episode #108: Marketing 101 – How to Fill Your Pipeline with Renovation Projects