How to organise your materials, physical and digital

Every studio has the shelf. Fabric memos in a carrier bag, a stack of tile samples that have outlived the project, four identical off-whites nobody can tell apart because the labels came off, and a Farrow and Ball fan deck with three cards missing.

Every studio also has the other half of the problem, which nobody talks about as much: the digital record that is supposed to correspond to the shelf and does not. A folder of screenshots. A spreadsheet with a link column that got truncated in a CSV export two years ago. A Pinterest board called “kitchen ideas FINAL”.

The two halves fail together, and fixing one without the other is why most material-library overhauls do not survive their first busy month. What follows is a system for both, and a rule for what to throw away.

Start with the honest audit

Before buying a single box, sort what you have into four piles.

Live. Currently specified or under consideration on an active project.

Reference. Things you go back to across projects. Your standard white, the three linens you always end up recommending, the porcelain you have used on six bathrooms.

Dead. Discontinued, from a supplier you no longer use, or from a project that completed eighteen months ago.

Unidentifiable. No label, no memory, no chance.

The fourth pile goes in the bin today. Not into a “sort later” box. An unlabelled sample is not a sample; it is a piece of fabric. The third pile goes too, with one exception noted below.

Most studios find that between a third and a half of what is on the shelf is in piles three and four. That is normal, and clearing it is most of the win.

Storing the physical

Three principles, in order of how much difference they make.

1. Sort by material, not by project

Projects end. Materials persist, and you specify across them. Fabrics with fabrics, tiles with tiles, paint with paint, timber and laminate together, metals and ironmongery together. Once a project completes, its samples either become reference or they go.

The exception is a live project with a large or unusual palette, which earns a temporary box of its own until it completes. Temporary. Put a date on it.

2. Every single item gets a label, at the moment it arrives

Supplier, range, colour or finish name, reference code, date received. A cheap label printer pays for itself the first time you avoid re-ordering something. The five minutes when the memo comes out of the envelope is the only moment you will reliably know what it is.

3. Store vertically and visibly

Flat stacks mean you handle the whole pile to find one thing, so you stop looking. Vertical files for fabric memos, shallow drawers or vertical racks for hard samples, wall-mounted holders for fan decks and the things you reach for weekly. If you cannot see it without moving three other things, you will not use it.

A note on scale: a solo designer working from home needs vertical files, one shallow drawer unit and a wall rack, and that is genuinely enough. Do not build a studio system for a one-person practice; it will not get maintained.

The digital half, which is the half that usually fails

Physical organisation is a solved problem and most designers do it reasonably well under pressure. The digital record is where the time actually goes.

Every physical sample needs a digital twin, and the twin needs the URL. A sample on a shelf tells you what something looks like. It does not tell you the price, the lead time, the trade discount, the width of the roll, or where to order it. That information lives on a web page, and the single most valuable thing you can do is keep a working link to that page attached to the record. The mechanics of that, and why the link is the part that always goes missing, are the subject of how to stop losing the products you find.

If you take one thing from this piece, take that. A record without a URL is a memory. A record with one is a specification waiting to happen. In practice that means capturing at the point of finding, which is why a one right-click save that keeps the URL, title, price and image beats any filing session you promise yourself for Friday.

Record the supplier as its own thing. Most designers work with the same fifteen to twenty suppliers repeatedly. Keeping the trade account details, the discount, the rep name and the lead times you have actually experienced in one place, with everything you have ever saved from that supplier underneath, removes an entire category of admin. It also removes the failure mode where a client approves something and you cannot remember who supplied it. A vendor card per brand does this without you maintaining a second spreadsheet.

Make colour searchable.You will frequently remember an item by its colour and nothing else. If your system cannot answer “show me everything in that chalky green”, that memory is useless to you. A colour tag is much better than nothing. Automatic palette extraction and search by hex is better still, because nobody types hex values by hand. What it will not do is tell you what a colour becomes on a wall, which is a separate problem covered in matching a hex colour to a paint colour.

If you would rather do all of this in a spreadsheet, and for a lot of studios that is the right answer, we have put two up for free with no email wall: a supplier and trade account list and an FF&E schedule. Both have a column for the lead time you actually experienced, which is the one nobody keeps and everybody needs.

Tag by project and room, not by style.Style tags feel intuitive and retrieve badly, because your idea of “warm minimal” moves. Project and room are stable and you always know both.

Keeping it alive

Systems decay. Build the maintenance in or accept that you are rebuilding this every eighteen months.

Weekly, ten minutes. Everything that arrived this week gets labelled, shelved and given a digital record with a URL. Do it at a fixed time. Friday afternoon works because nobody is starting anything.

Quarterly, an hour. Walk the shelf. Anything from a completed project that has not become reference goes. Anything discontinued goes, digital record included, or you will re-specify it. Anything you have not touched in a year and cannot name a reason to keep goes.

Annually. Ask which suppliers you actually used this year. If the shelf is full of samples from three suppliers you have not specified since 2024, the shelf is a museum.

The one thing not to throw away

Keep a small archive of everything you actually specified on completed projects, with the reference codes. Not the whole scheme. Just the specified items.

When a client rings in three years asking to match the paint in the hall or replace a damaged tile, that archive is the difference between five minutes and an afternoon. It is also the only reliable record of what a room is actually made of once the drawings have been superseded a dozen times.

Digital records make this nearly free: keep the completed project collection, archive it, and stop maintaining it. VADE is a sourcing library rather than a procurement suite, so the archive is exactly that, a record you can search, not a purchase-order trail.

How much should I spend on storage?

Less than you think. Vertical files, a shallow drawer unit and a label printer covers a solo practice for under £200. The label printer is the item with the best return.

Should I photograph every sample?

No. Photograph the ones whose colour or texture you will need to recall remotely. For everything else, the supplier product photograph is better lit than yours will be and it comes attached to the page you actually need.

How do I stop the shelf filling up again?

Order fewer speculative samples, and put a date on everything. If it has been there a year without being specified, it goes. Most over-ordering is a substitute for a searchable digital library, because it is easier to ask for another memo than to find the record of the last one.

Physical or digital first?

Digital, if you have to choose. The physical shelf is only useful when you can remember what is on it, and that is what the digital record is for.

Does colour matching from a screen actually work?

Not for sign-off. There is real variation between your monitor and a client monitor, and between both and the room. Use digital colour to find and group things. Use physical samples, in the actual room, in the actual light, to decide.