Expert Home Design for Less

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“One might think that to run an e-commerce company you need in-house teams,” says Kelly Fallis, Founder and CEO of RemoteStylist.com, an online furniture platform based out of  Toronto, Canada, and New York, USA. “I treat mine like they are, yet they are many thousand miles away and more often than not, on the other side of the world leading to interesting time changes.” Kelly is speaking of her outsourcing experience, most notably on the world’s most preferred online outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.com. “The talent, the caliber, and the speed at which work gets done continues to blow my mind—just a bunch of experts helping each other out.”

RemoteStylist.com has furniture from 350+ companies, $1 shipping (duties included) in Canada and the USA and free Stylists to help one shop. She describes the entire process: “Users generally come armed with weblinks or photos from spaces they’ve seen and say ‘I like that table, but I want it in a different finish, size or style.’ And of course, advertisements generally feature the high end of any line to make it look better so budget is always a factor.  They are immediately connected to a Stylist and we comb through the product line up to find the best alternatives.  Items are readily available via the website and are shipped directly from the manufacturer to the user’s location, home or business.”

This hassle-free approach to decorating a space logically follows from Kelly’s previous entrepreneurial venture in home staging where private residences are prepped up in such a way to increase their appeal to potential home buyers. In helping move 750+ households, she discovered that it wasn’t how organized or how much help one had post-move that mattered; it was the frustration and little nuances of finding the right furnishings and setting up home quickly in the new place. “I knew something needed to be done about it. People shop differently because of the Internet; so my gut said it’s a space I wanted to be in,” she recalls. “I’ve always liked pretty rooms and homes in general, and I excel at sourcing so it was a natural fit.”

Using Freelancer.com Kelly has outsourced web development, graphics, and data entry. The data entry involved encoding data (product, shipping, inventory, imagery) of all the products the company sells using a standard format in a database.

While she has tried other outsourcing platforms, she prefers Freelancer.com because “it doesn’t overcomplicate matters!”  She is able to see the feedback on the freelancers, discuss projects with them, get the quotes, and talk to them. The reporting and Milestone Payment feature are also “brilliantly simple.”

“I highly recommend that people ditch the mindset that you need to be sitting next to someone to get work done, and explore,” she advises. “You’ll end up saving so much time, money and headache utilizing a service like Freelancer®.

“The best part about Freelancer® is the other people who use it—like minds. We’ve developed many long term relations as a result of this online marketplace.”

Kelly’s Tips

  1. Get to know the freelancer prior to hiring by using the messaging system.

  2. Interview the freelancer. Ask questions.

  3. Break your projects into smaller chunks to see progress faster.

Posted 16 December, 2015

Nikki Hernandez

Wired and Inspired | Content Coordinator, Freelancer.com

I'm the coordinator of Freelancer's Case Study Program. I write inspirational success stories of employers and freelancers. When not busy writing, I play video games.

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