Create your first project
Set up a project the way it will serve you a year from now: the name, rooms, and budget that every schedule, render, and client document inherits.
A project is the container for one job: its rooms, its budget, its selections, and every document the job produces. Creating one takes under a minute, but the choices on this screen echo downstream: the name on your client portal, the rooms your schedule groups by, the budget your selections track against. Here is how to get each one right.
What a project holds
Think of a project as the front door to a job. Behind it live the rooms in scope, the selections assigned to each room, the budget those selections track against, and the documents the job accumulates: proposals, agreements, spec sheets, purchase orders, invoices. Mood boards, renders, and floor plans all attach here too. Because everything hangs off the project, nothing needs re-entering: a sofa you select for the living room shows up on the schedule, in the budget, on the client portal, and in the purchase order without you touching it again.
The setup, field by field
The form asks for three things: a name, the rooms in scope, and a budget. None of them are locked in, but each is worth ten seconds of thought.
- 1
Open the new project form
From your dashboard, click New project. You can also press ⌘K and type "new project". Search reaches every action in Tailor, not just records.
- 2
Name it after the home
"Hillside Residence" beats "Smith Job #4" a year from now. The name appears on schedules, spec sheets, invoices, and the client portal, so a name that identifies the home keeps every downstream document self-explanatory.
If your studio runs multiple projects for one client, the address or a wing name keeps them distinct.
- 3
Add the rooms in scope
Click the room chips for the spaces you are actually designing this phase: living room, dining room, primary bedroom. Rooms organize your selections, group your schedule, and anchor your renders.
Rooms are cheap. Add, rename, or remove them any time from project settings. Starting narrow costs you nothing.
- 4
Set a budget
Enter a number, even a rough guess like 85,000. Every selection you make tracks against it automatically, room by room, so you always know where the project stands without opening a spreadsheet.
- 5
Attach a client, or don’t yet
If the client already exists in Tailor, link them now and their portal picks up the project automatically. If you are still in pitch mode, skip it. You can attach a client at any point, and Tailor’s AI Chat can even create one for you when the proposal goes out.
- 6
Create it
Click Create. Tailor scaffolds the project on the spot: your rooms are in place, budget tracking is live, and an empty schedule is waiting for its first selection.
Start a new project from your dashboard
Transcript · Create your first project
- 1Everything in Tailor lives in a project. Start one from your dashboard.
- 2Name the project. Most studios use the home's name. This one is Hillside Residence.
- 3Add the rooms in scope. Rooms organize your selections, schedules, and renders.
- 4Create the project. Tailor sets up the rooms and an empty schedule for you.
What Tailor sets up for you
The moment you click Create, the project is more than an empty folder. Each room you added is ready to receive selections. The schedule exists, organized by those rooms, waiting for its first line item. Budget tracking is on, so the first product you assign starts the running total. And the design tabs are live: open a mood board, the Visualizer, or a floor plan and they all know which project and rooms they belong to. There is no second setup step.
Habits that pay off later
Two small disciplines make projects easier to live with over months. First, keep one project per job. Resist the urge to run two phases of the same home as separate projects; the budget and schedule are most useful when they see the whole picture. Second, add rooms as scope grows rather than front-loading every space in the house. A schedule grouped by four real rooms reads better than one padded with six empty ones.
Before you move on
- Project named after the home, not the client or a job number
- Only in-scope rooms added, the rest can come later
- A working budget entered, even if it is a rough figure
- Client attached, or a note to attach one when the proposal goes out
Where to go from here
An empty project wants products. The next guide covers the four ways to bring them in: pasting a retailer URL, clipping while you browse, describing what you need to the AI, and entering trade pieces by hand. It also shows how your studio library keeps every import reusable across jobs. From there, the path runs straight through the schedule to client approvals, and every step reads from the project you just set up.
Start your first project
Create a project in under a minute and have the rooms, budget, and schedule scaffolded before your coffee cools.
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