Always wanted to change your house, your garden or just want to switch your interior up, but you did not know how? Arcbazar is the answer. It is the number 1 crowdsourcing marketplace for architectural, interior and landscape design projects and let you crowdsource your projects to over 10.000 architectural, interior and landscape designers from around the world.

Arcbazar was founded in December 1010 by Imdat As, Ana Batista and Halit Ciftci, after realizing that all too often clients could not find an easy and affordable way to find competitive architectural design services, while at the same time, designers had a hard time to connect to clients and use their design talent. Their website arcbazar.com is the first website that holds online competitions for small to medium scale design projects. Their aim is to help their peers, young designers and architects find exciting design opportunities from design conscious individuals.

Starting your project

At Arcbazar, any client can start a design competition. Here you can fill in your title and your project type and Arcbazar will already come up with a list of deliverables that designers should come up with. You can alter this if you need any specific document or if you want less deliverables.  After this basic information, you are asked to describe your project. Arcbazar even helps you with some questions that can be answered in order for the project information to be more complete. Here the project can be described, but also your goals, challenges and specific requests to the designers.  You set the deadline, fill in an award and launch your project. If you’re still in doubt about the project, you have 24 hours of free cancelation.

How should you reward the designers?

The minimum award of your project is given by Arcbazar to make sure the awards are fair to the designers. However, this minimum amount is nog the ‘perfect’ award, Arcbazar also suggests an ideal award for your design competition, but you are free to choose your own. This award also should be payed up front, to make sure the designers get rewarded for their effort. One of the new things of this contest is that more than one designer will win a price. The 1st prize winner you select will get 60% of your award, the 2nd prize winner 30% and the 3rd prize winner 10% of your award money. If you feel bad for other designers which idea you also liked very much, you can give them an extra bonus. If there are no submissions at your deadline, the competition is void and you will get your money back.

Interaction between clients and designers

You can keep in contact with the designers through a wall where designers can ask you questions about your project. All questions/answers in the wall are public, so every designer gets the same amount of information. If you want to inform the designers even more during the project, you can also post any text/images on your project wall. Designers who signed-up for your project will automatically get notified.

How to select your winner?

It is hard to select a winner of your competition. Therefore Arcbazar created a public voting feature, which you can select after the deadline. Users of Arcbazar can then vote and evaluate your project designs and give you valuable feedback on your submissions.

What’s in it for the designers?

Of course the money you can win is a big motivation for designers to participate. However Arcbazar also has a point system. To motivate the designers, designers can get points when voting for other projects, signing up to a project, submitting an idea to a project and when winning prizes. To motivate them to actually submit an idea after they signed up for a project, they can also get a deduction of points when not submitting to a project they signed up for. There is a top 50 designer page on the website linking to their profiles, so the more points you get, the more exposure you get.

Designers can even earn money by using affiliate company products in their design. At the end of each year, Arcbazar will share 10% of all product sales proceeds with all designers proportionally.