Marketplaces & Platforms
1stDibs iOS App
Mobile strategy for a luxury marketplace that serves both inspiration and commerce. Designed an iOS app for shoppers and a dealer app for sellers, evolved through multi-year partnership based on how people actually used the platform.
Client
1stDibs
Timeline
2013–2020
Service & Offer
Sector
Platform
1stDibs is a marketplace with extraordinary depth and breadth: furniture, jewelry, fine art, collectibles from galleries and dealers worldwide. The challenge wasn't building an app. It was bringing that complexity to mobile without losing what makes 1stDibs special. They knew they needed to do it. They didn't know how.
Challenge
How do you move a luxury marketplace with hundreds of thousands of items across dozens of categories onto a phone?
The marketplace's power comes from curation and discovery. But mobile has constraints. Screen real estate is limited. Users have different intentions at different times. Some come to browse. Some come to buy. Some come to track specific dealers or search for something specific. How could a native app serve all of those needs without becoming bloated?
The Approach
We held a workshop with 1stDibs to explore what mobile could do differently. The ideas that emerged used location to help shoppers find nearby galleries and dealers. We designed collections as a discovery mechanism—curated starting points to help people find items they didn't know they were looking for. We built a design system that could handle rich imagery and deep categories without overwhelming users.
As we launched and watched how people actually used the app, a core insight became clear: it wasn't just for buying. It started with discovery. People opened the app to be inspired, to save items, to message dealers. The app needed to support both the exploratory mindset and the transactional one.
Key Design Decisions
Category-agnostic with category-specific PDPs
The core navigation treated all categories the same way: rich imagery, visual filters, save and favorite options. But we learned through research that buyers in different categories needed different information.
Jewelry buyers wanted to see authenticity, provenance, and scale. How does it hang on the body? What's the story behind it?
Furniture buyers needed different guidance depending on whether they were in the trade or shopping for themselves. Regular consumers needed help understanding scale and how pieces fit in a room. Trade buyers cared about lead times and sourcing information.
We designed PDP templates that could extend to these category-specific needs without fragmenting the experience.
Location-based discovery
Showed nearby galleries and dealers. A shopper could find local sources, which mattered for furniture especially, where seeing something in person changes the decision.
Collections and saved searches
Both supported the core insight that mobile is a discovery tool. Users could save what inspired them and build on it over time.
Multi-caregiver foundation
Built messaging directly into the app so shoppers and dealers could communicate in context. No email switching.
Evolution
Over several years, we added features and refined the design based on actual usage. "Make an Offer" functionality emerged because we watched how mobile changed negotiation. Follow features let users track specific dealers. Favorite folders let people organize discoveries by category or room.
Then we discovered a new mobile need: dealers needed to manage messages and respond to inquiries when not at their desk. The faster the message response, the faster the sale. So we designed a dealer-facing iOS app, applying the same design system but solving a different problem: efficiency and speed instead of discovery and inspiration.
We did research for the dealer app too, learning how different dealer types used 1stDibs tools and what would extend to mobile best. A high-volume dealer had different needs than a gallery owner with fewer items but deep relationships.
Outcome
The app launched as 1stDibs' first native iOS experience. It distilled a luxury marketplace with extraordinary breadth into a mobile experience that served both discovery and commerce. The design system proved flexible enough to support category-specific variations without losing coherence.
The dealer app launched, extending the design system to a different user. Over the multi-year partnership, the platform evolved based on what we learned about how mobile changed buying and selling behavior.
“Working with the Everyday team was amazing! They were able to distill the complex aspects of the 1stDibs marketplace into an easy-to-use and delightful mobile iOS app for our customers.”
Xiaodi Zhang, Chief Product Officer
Interested in working together?
Whether you’re launching something new, scaling an existing product, or need a design partner who can navigate complexity and move fast without sacrificing quality — I’d love to hear about it.