Apr 20, 2020 3 min read

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.

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
— Ash Read (@Ashread_) April 19, 2020

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:

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