Why studios and factories belong on the same network
Design studios and modular factories already depend on each other. They just do it over email. An open network lets independent workspaces discover and transact across boundaries — without ever sharing a workspace.
A design studio and a modular-manufacturing factory are two of the most interdependent businesses in the built environment — and two of the least connected. The studio designs something buildable; the factory builds it. Between them sits a fog of PDFs, phone calls, and spec sheets that were current two revisions ago. Every project re-negotiates the same interface from scratch.
We think that interface should be a network, not a negotiation. IN65 is built so that independent studios and independent factories can discover each other, quote each other, and transact with each other — without ever having to share a workspace or hand over their internal data.
Independent workspaces, not a shared drive
The instinct with collaboration software is to put everyone in one room. That is exactly wrong for businesses that compete as often as they cooperate. A studio does not want its full catalog, margins, and client list visible to every factory it sends an RFQ to. A factory does not want its capacity and cost structure exposed to every studio that asks for a quote.
So IN65 keeps each workspace sovereign. Your data is yours. What crosses the boundary is only what a transaction requires — an RFQ with the lines a factory needs to quote, a quote with the price and lead time a studio needs to decide. Everything else stays behind your own wall.
Discovery is the missing primitive
Most studios work with the three factories they happened to meet. Most factories fill their line with the studios that happened to find them. Neither is a market; both are an address book. An open network changes the default: a studio with an unusual millwork spec can find a factory that actually makes it, and a factory with open capacity can be discovered by studios it has never emailed.
- Studios discover factories by capability, not by who they already know.
- Factories surface open capacity to studios actively sourcing work.
- RFQs and quotes move across workspace boundaries as structured records, not attachments.
- Each side keeps its own catalog, pricing, and client relationships private.
Independence and connection are not opposites. The right network lets you stay a separate business while behaving like a connected one.
Why this has to be open
A closed platform where a studio can only reach the factories that platform pre-selected is just a bigger address book with a subscription fee. The value compounds only when the network is open at the edges — when any studio and any factory can find one another and transact on equal terms. That is the marketplace IN65 is building toward: not one workspace everyone shares, but many workspaces that can reach each other on demand.