Pitch externally.
From one library.

One library, two audiences.

Internally you want everything: trade prices, contacts, the messy long-list. Externally a client wants a considered, branded board that makes the decision easy. VADE lets the same collection be both, and you decide, per share, exactly what crosses the line.

No exporting to a deck, no rebuilding in another tool, no version that drifts out of date. Change the library, the share updates.

Why this is how designers actually work.

Ask designers where sharing goes wrong and the answer is almost never the design. One described the difficulty as “getting the images organised in a way that I can share the link, and it’s easily used by clients”. Both halves of that sentence matter. Organising is the work. Easily used by clients is the test, and it is the half most tools fail.

The current workflow is usually a PDF that is too big to email, a shared folder the client cannot navigate, or a deck rebuilt by hand because the sourcing lives somewhere the client can never be allowed to see. Designers already describe the job as “35% designing and 65% logistics”, and rebuilding the same information in a second format for a second audience is pure logistics.

There is a commercial reason for the two audiences too. Trade discounts of 20% to 40% are normal, with 25% treated as a sweet spot, and how that margin is presented is a studio decision rather than a client-facing fact. A board that can hide the trade price and the supplier contact per share is not being coy, it is matching how the trade has always worked.

One share, walked through.

A master bedroom and en suite in a new-build flat. Over three weeks the collection has grown to twenty-eight saves, which is roughly three times what anybody should be shown. On the Thursday before the meeting you cut it to nine: a bed, two side tables, a wall light, a rug, two fabrics and two paint tiles.

You compose the board, pick a layout, and write two sentences over the draft blurb. Then you set the share: trade prices hidden, supplier contacts hidden, product list visible so the client can see what each piece actually is. Publish, copy the link, paste it into the email you were writing anyway.

The client opens it on a phone that evening, forwards it to their partner, and comes back on Monday having approved the bed and the rug and asked whether the wall light comes in a warmer finish. Nobody created an account. Nobody asked what software you were using.

You swap the wall light in the library, and the shared link shows the new one without you sending a second version of anything. When the scheme moves on, you unpublish and the link is dead.

What this is not.

This is not a client portal. There is no client login, no message thread, no document vault and no shared task list. It is a board on a link, and the fact that it stops there is the reason clients actually open it.

It is also not a proposal tool. It does not collect approvals, it does not capture signatures, it does not record who ticked what and when, and it will not produce a contract or a fee schedule. If a client says yes on a board, they say it in an email or on the phone, the way they always have, and you keep that record where you keep the rest of your paperwork.

And VADE is not a procurement or project-management suite. No purchase orders, no invoicing, no payments, no scheduling. If you want all of that in one system, our comparison with Programa sets out where the line falls and why we have deliberately stayed on the sourcing side of it.

What else it unlocks.

A share is only as good as the library behind it. The board itself is composed by the moodboard layouts, which arrange your saved products into something editorial rather than a grid of thumbnails. The pieces on it arrived through a one-click save from the open web, which is why every product on a client board is one you can actually buy. Ordering the board by tone is a colour search away, so a scheme reads as one thing. And the supplier behind each piece stays on its vendor card, visible to you and hidden from the client whenever you choose.

Getting the board approved is a separate craft from building it, and mostly a matter of editing rather than software. There is a working method in how to make a moodboard a client signs off.

Questions, answered.

How do I share a board with a client?

Publish any collection as a read-only page with a private link. The client opens it in the browser, with no account and no app. You control the layout and exactly which fields they see.

Does my client need an account?

No. That is the whole point of the private link. Your client clicks it, the board opens in whatever browser they happen to be using, and they can read it on a phone in a car park if that is where they are. No sign-up, no password, no app to install, no invitation to accept. The people who most need to see the board are the least likely to tolerate creating an account to do it.

Can I hide trade prices and supplier contacts?

Yes. Per board, you choose what a client sees. Hide trade prices, vendor contacts or the underlying product list entirely, and there is a layout that shows just the composed hero and your blurb when the image itself is the deliverable.

Is the share page branded as my studio?

Yes. The page carries your studio's chosen brand name and styling, not VADE's, so the client sees your practice. Your client-facing brand can differ from your billing details.

Can I un-share a board?

At any time. Unpublishing nulls the link immediately, so a board you have moved on from stops being reachable the moment you say so.

Is there a printable version?

Yes. Boards export to a print-ready A3 landscape PDF with the hero, your title and blurb, and a thumbnail strip, so the same deliverable works on screen and on paper.

Does it work if my suppliers are small independents?

Yes. A board is composed from whatever you saved, so a one-person ceramics studio sits on the same board as a large brand with a proper trade portal. There is no catalogue requirement and no supplier integration to arrange, because the save came from the open web in the first place.

What does it cost, and does it replace my proposal tool?

Saving, organising and searching are free forever. Shareable, studio-branded client pages sit on the paid tiers: Solo at £12 a month and Studio at £29 a month for up to five seats, cancellable from billing settings. It sits alongside your proposal and contract process rather than replacing it, because VADE is not a procurement or project-management suite: no purchase orders, no invoicing, no payments, no scheduling.