Innovation meets home decor with Pair
This startup is already receiving great praise from HGTV.ca and Dwell
Don’t you wish you had a way to test a look in your living room? Do you want to see how that chair will look in your kitchen? That’s exactly what Pair, a new interior design app and Parallel18 Gen1 startup, does for users. It’s easy to get lost for hours in its catalog of furniture and accessories… it’s sort of a “Pinterest addiction” kind of situation!
Israel Medina, one of it’s co-founders and business developers, talked to us about how the app came about and became part of the startups chosen by Parallel18.
“It started as an app for designers only, and pivoted to focus on the everyday mobile user,” says Israel. “ We launched 4 months ago with the redesign and now it has approximately 3,000 products.”
This has paid off with amazing traction and features in HGTV.ca and Dwell’s website. The praise has been all positive:
“This is THE app you’ve been waiting for, and it will change everything.” — Elana Safronsky, lifestyle writer and managing editor of HGTV.ca
“…anyone with an iPad or iPhone can — quite literally — rapidly visualize furniture in any space.” — Zachary Edelson, Dwell.com
And now, with Parallel18, Pair has the support it needs to grow.
How this relationship started? From acquaintances who mentioned Parallel18’s first call for applications. But the reason Medina, a Puerto Rican native, submitted Pair to the accelerator was all about the heart: “I spent ten years living out of Puerto Rico, I saw the economic crisis and saw it as a good idea to hire locals. We wanted to have our headquarters in Puerto Rico, have a local team. There’s so much talent in Puerto Rico and we wanted to take advantage of that.”
As of today, Pair has already made its first local hire and plans to have more. It has also been selected as one of the companies to be part of 500 Startups Generation 17.
Israel mentions the access to mentorship as the best thing about being part of the first class of Paralell18, “the first month they connected us with Manuel Rosso (who is the is VP of Commerce Platforms at Scripps Networks Interactive, owner of Food Network, Food.com, Cooking Channel, HGTV, The Travel Channel and others.) He helped us refining the product for the mass market.”
Also, the tax incentives and government help has been useful for the startup. “Creating the products involves money so we are using the grant for that and to pay our new employees salary.”
As one of the pioneers at Parallel18, Israel wanted to give this advice to the new batch of founders hoping to be part of the community of entrepreneurs in the Island: “Hustle… being close [to] the beach is nice, but Parallel 18 has a great network and 20 weeks go by fast! Take advantage of it.”
