Building Living Cozy: A Running Diary
Living Cozy is a discovery tool that surfaces the best modern home and DIY brands. I launched the site in April 2020. This page is a running diary of updates and progress.
April 20th — Added Shop Local
I would like to refine the design a little but I'm feeling good about people being able to discover brands from their city/area. Only UK, LA and NYC for now but I hope to add to this as more brands get added to the site.

April 19th — Shared to Twitter
Sunday afternoon, I'd just added a few more brands to the site and after seeing encouraging signs from posting to Reddit, I decided to share HomeSupply on Twitter.
When I moved house recently, I found it hard to discover modern homeware brands.
— Ash Read (@Ashread_) April 19, 2020
I started saving brands I saw on Instagram to a collection, then a spreadsheet, and this past week I built a site to curate home/DIY brands: https://t.co/UUju9eQD91
Replies from Luca, Marijana, Len and Emmett felt particulalry encouraging. (Luca's tweet inspired me to hop back on my laptop and work on v1 of 'Shop Local'.)
April 18th — Posted to Reddit
Always risky... but Reddit can be a good source of feedback and traffic. I posted to a few home-based/interior design sub-reddits and the posts got a few upvotes (and one negative comment).
The analytics data for day one made me feel good:

April 8-18th
This idea had been sitting in Notion for quite a few months. I'd experimented with Weblflow a little to try and build it from scratch —


— but decided to buy a Webflow template that would allow me to move quicker and ship something I was happy with.
Here are some screenshots from the launch version of Homesupply...
Homepage:

Discover:

Brand page:

May 30th
I started a blog to target some long-tail keywords and gradually build up some traffic. So far I have four posts:
- How to Choose Wall Art For Your Home
- 10 Kitchenware Brands Bringing Professional Quality Products to Home Chefs
- Sofa vs Couch: Is There a Difference?
- 16 Direct-to-Consumer Furniture Brands You Need to Know Right Now
I'm setting a goal from July to publish new content twice per week.
June 17th
When I first launched, this project was called HomeSupply. But then after a few weeks I started looking for a new domain. A friend spotted LivingCozy.com on Sedo so I picked it up and migrated the site over the weekend.
I made the change for a couple of reasons:
- Both HomeSupply.com and .co.uk are in use, and it just felt a little confusing to build a new brand with that name. And, more importantly;
- I feel Cozy represents what I hope this community can become a little better