About Designcatalogs
What we are for
Designcatalogs exists so that the work a brand puts into its catalogue reaches the people it was made for and realises its full potential.
That is the whole mission. Everything below is how.
What a catalogue actually is
A catalogue is one of the most considered things a brand makes. It runs from the first image to the last technical table — photography, art direction and the thinking behind a solution at one end; dimensions, finishes, fire classifications and certifications at the other. It is also what a sales team opens in front of a client when the question is whether a solution fits.
Architects, interior designers, landscape architects and specifiers each need different parts of that document, at different stages, sometimes years apart.
It is a serious investment, and much of it ends up in a PDF that is hard to search and easy to lose. Our job is to put that work back in front of the people it was made for — the inspiration as well as the specification.
The problem we started from
Manufacturers publish technical information in catalogues, PDFs, microsites, gated libraries and download links. Each is organised in its own way. They were not designed to be searched together, and they are rarely searchable by the thing a specifier actually needs — a fire classification, a fabric rub count, a seat height, or a certification that has to hold in the jurisdiction you are building in.
So a specifier ends up with folders of downloads, a browser full of tabs, and a memory of which brand had the thing. That is the work we are trying to remove.
What we do
We gather the catalogues. Our own editorial team obtains, prepares and tags them — brands do not upload them. That is why a spread designed as a spread still reads as one, and why a table of technical values arrives as values rather than as a picture of a table.
We consider the whole catalogue, not just its title: the products, materials, applications and specifications it contains. That means a catalogue can be found through information buried deep inside it, rather than only through the words on its cover.
We describe products in one structure. A taxonomy of categories and technical properties sits underneath the library, so that "chair" and "Stuhl" and "seating" reach the same place, and so that a property means the same thing whichever brand wrote it.
We distinguish requirements that depend on jurisdiction rather than flattening them into one global answer. A specification that applies in one place may not apply in another, and the structure underneath Designcatalogs is built to preserve that distinction.
Who is in the library, and on what terms
Any brand we judge relevant to practice. That decision is editorial and it is not for sale. We carry brands with no commercial relationship with us, and we have declined brands who wanted one.
This is where Designcatalogs differs from Designheroes, and the difference is worth stating plainly: on Designheroes, a brand's current products are published only after it meets the editorial criteria AND enters a commercial relationship. Here there is no such condition. Whether a catalogue is in the library is an editorial decision, and no fee decides it.
Partners. Some brands are Designcatalogs partners. Partnership affects how deeply a catalogue is tagged, whether its pages link out to the brand's own product pages, and the order in which matching catalogues appear. It does not affect what we write, and no brand's marketing copy is presented as our editorial text.
Who may use it
Professionals. Registration is reviewed and approved by a person, and that is not a growth tactic we are apologising for — it is what lets brands release detailed technical material into a room they can see the shape of.
There is no guest phase. If you specify products for a living, the approval takes as long as it takes us to read your registration.
Who is behind it
Designcatalogs is a product of Designstandard AG, a Swiss company in Zurich. Designheroes and Designfinder are the other two, and all three share the same specification taxonomy underneath.
Nils Becker — founder
Susanne Fritz — founder
Julia Lázaro García
Morgana Neves
More about the company: About Designstandard
Our shareholders
Archiproducts S.r.l. holds a minority shareholding in Designstandard, under 30 per cent, and acts as our commercial representative for brand partnerships in the European Union. Archiproducts also operates its own platform, which is separate from ours.
Archiproducts itself is part of the Mondadori Group. That is a strength rather than a caveat: our commercial representative in the European Union has an established media group behind it. We state it plainly all the same, because you should be able to see who holds an interest in an editorial platform and judge it for yourself.
We say so here for the same reason we publish the ranking page: a shareholder who sells our partnerships is a relationship you are entitled to weigh. It does not change the rule above — whether a catalogue is in the library is an editorial decision, and that holds for a partner, a shareholder, or anyone else.
What we are not
We are not a shop. Nothing is sold here, there is no basket, and we take no commission on anything you buy from anyone.
We are not a substitute for the manufacturer's current documentation. We are a fast way to find it and to compare across it. Before you specify, order or build, check the source and take professional advice — the technical content here is for orientation.
We are not comprehensive. We hold the catalogues we judge relevant to architectural practice, not every catalogue in circulation.