OUR HISTORY

As a leader in the stock home plan industry, Design Basics, LLC. designs and markets plans for single-family homes through catalogs, newsstand magazines and home building industry publications. Our company began in 1983 as a custom home plan design firm for the professional builders of our local community - Omaha, Nebraska. As the popularity of our designs increased, we expanded our focus from designing for the local market only, to designing plans that would be adaptable anywhere. Since then, home builder and consumer interest in our plans has grown tremendously in all 50 states and countries around the world.

Today, we are the nation’s largest home plan design service to the building industry and to home owners, offering a variety of home plans and desigs, a plan alteration service, custom home design service, as well as professional marketing products and services. Our company has been recognized nationally for home design, business management, corporate growth, sales and the development of effective marketing products. This growth and success over the years has helped us define our mission statement - "Where Great Design Matters."

WOMAN-CENTRIC MATTERS!^SM
Woman-Centric Matters!^sm, a division of Design Basics, is a powerful business approach and education platform that teaches businesses how to become remarkable by transforming their attitudes and practices based on the woman's perspective.

Taking a woman-centric approach means designing everything from her perspective:

• The actual product or service
• Sales and marketing
• Training
• Her overall experience
• The physical environment

At its core is understanding your female customers so innately that you can actually anticipate what they want even before they ask for it.

In addition, woman-centric approaches are rooted in a keen appreciation for how women differ from men in their purchase decision process, as well as insights on why they buy.

How Woman-Centric Origins

It all began in mid-air on a flight back to Omaha in January 2003 when the president of Design Basics, one of the nation’s premier design firms, was reading an article in Forbes magazine about the impact of female consumers. Reading that article was an "Ah ha!" moment.

If women are making the decisions on most of the purchases, then many businesses could benefit from learning how to market, sell and design their products and services around the things that actually matter to women. Later that same year, Design Basics launched Her Home Magazine, a publication targeted to women home buyers, and began two years of extensive research on how women make buying decisions.

In 2005, Design Basics launched a new division called Woman-Centric Matters!^sm and began licensing and training business on how to effectively target new female customers and keep their current female customers coming back again and again. A unique bundle of products and services were developed to support the Woman-Centric Matters!^sm brand, available exclusively to companies who choose to license the brand within their marketplace.

HER Home Magazine
In January 2003, Design Basics Inc., recognized a need to publish a magazine for women in the dreaming or planning stage of building a new home or remodeling their present home.

Because research shows 80% of homebuilding and remodeling decisions are made by women, she was amazed there wasn't a single women's magazine on the newsstand at the time with this focus.

It didn't take long for the vision to become concrete. The first issue of Her Home magazine was launched in September of 2003. From the start, Linda's goal was to provide practical information and a wealth of ideas to help women make these major decisions.

Unlike home decoration magazines, Her Home magazine focuses on women's perspectives on design, construction and products for the home, and includes input from leading women homebuilders and industry experts.

Her Home magazine is written to give women the information and tools to make informed decisions when building a new home or remodeling their present home.

Utilizing smart, fresh layouts and plenty of beautiful photography, each article is written with practical, take-away value. There is a need for this type of women's magazine, and Her Home magazine will work hard to fill that need.

AWARDS & HONORS
Over the years, hundreds of homebuilders have received awards for homes they’ve built from Design Basics plans and entered in special events such as street of dreams or parade of home events. In as much as we are pleased to contribute to the success of our customers, Design Basics itself has also been recognized with several awards for accomplishments in the home building industry as well as in business. A highlight of a few of these awards follows: