About Purlieu
We didn't set out to build software. We set out to build a better way to work.
Purlieu grew from firsthand experience across commercial interiors. Before working in design, sales, and FF&E procurement, members of our ownership group owned and operated hotels.
We have experienced projects from both sides: specifying and purchasing products, and receiving them at the property. We understand how decisions and handoffs affect the people responsible for making a project work on site.
That experience shaped our goal: a more connected, consistent way for teams to work, from the first opportunity through project management, purchasing, fulfillment, and delivery.
Invoicing is coming soon.
Sustainable growth requires more than fragmented systems and individualized processes.
Too much time was being spent reacting to urgent issues instead of working proactively. Project updates depended on conversations instead of shared data. Every team had its own way of working, which meant the client experience could change depending on who was managing the project.
What happens when someone leaves?
How do we know who has capacity?
How do we consistently deliver a great client experience as we grow?
The answer became clear
Growth couldn't depend on asking good people to work harder. It required a stronger foundation for how the entire organization worked.
How it grew
One problem at a time, we built the workflow we envisioned.
Nothing started as a feature looking for a problem. From the beginning, we had a clear vision:
Connect the entire workflow, from winning the work, through project execution and quoting, to purchasing, fulfillment, and delivery.
Because our experience extended beyond the office and into ownership and hotel operations, we understood that a breakdown upstream eventually becomes a problem on site. A missed specification, unclear purchase order, late shipment, or lost conversation does not stay inside the procurement team — it ultimately reaches the property, the installer, the operator, and the client. As we solved those roadblocks, every decision supported that same connected workflow.
Today, that vision continues to guide how Purlieu evolves as we work alongside our customers to solve real operational challenges and continuously strengthen the platform. The result is a system built around how the work actually moves, bringing greater consistency, visibility, and control across the organization and creating a stronger foundation for growth.
Sales had to become operations
What was learned while winning the work needed to carry into the project that delivered it.
Projects needed repeatable process
The way a good project runs should not depend on which manager happens to own it.
Product knowledge needed to carry forward
Specifications built once should stay usable across quotes, purchasing, and installation.
Quotes needed to become purchasing
Approved pricing should turn into commitments without rebuilding the same information.
Communication needed to stay connected
Vendor and customer conversations belong with the work they are about.
Leadership needed real visibility
Understanding workload, capacity, and risk should not require a round of phone calls.
Purlieu wasn't built by chasing features. It was intentionally designed around the way work actually moves for commercial interior teams.
Beyond one business
The same challenges reached far beyond where we started.
Our roots are in hospitality from more than one perspective. Our team has experience owning and operating hotels as well as designing, procuring, purchasing, and managing commercial interior projects. That combination gave us firsthand visibility into what happens both upstream and on site when information, product, schedules, or responsibilities fall out of alignment.
The challenges turned out to be much broader. Conversations with design, procurement, and project organizations across education, healthcare, retail, and other commercial interiors kept landing in the same place.
- Hospitality
- Education
- Healthcare
- Retail
- Commercial interiors
Built with experience from both sides of the project.
From ownership and operations to design, procurement, purchasing, and receiving, Purlieu was shaped by people who have experienced the FF&E workflow from multiple perspectives.
- Information fragmented across spreadsheets, inboxes, folders, and separate systems.
- Institutional knowledge living inside individual people rather than the company.
- Growth creating pressure that existing processes were never built to absorb.
- Turnover creating operational risk that nobody could quantify in advance.
- Leadership seeing results after the fact instead of while there was still time to act.
- Customers feeling the consequences whenever something slipped between hands.
Different industries, different projects, different vocabularies, and the same underlying operational strain. That recurrence is the reason Purlieu became a platform other firms could run on rather than an internal tool that stayed in one building.
Purpose
Better systems create better places to work.
Purlieu exists to remove unnecessary operational friction so talented people can spend more of their day doing the work they were actually hired to do.
People know what is expected
Clear process removes the daily guesswork about what comes next and who owns it.
People stop chasing information
Shared records mean the answer is already in the project rather than in someone's memory.
Managers can support their teams
Visible workload lets a leader step in before a person is quietly overwhelmed.
Onboarding gets easier
When process lives in the system, a new employee inherits it instead of absorbing it slowly.
Teams move from reactive to proactive
Seeing what is coming changes the job from responding to problems to preventing them.
Customers feel the difference
Supported teams communicate earlier, commit more accurately, and follow through.
Protect your people so they can protect your customers.
A service mindset
Technology built with a service mindset.
Hospitality teaches a simple standard. Good service anticipates what someone needs before they have to ask for it. That standard shaped how we think about software.
An operational system should do more than record what already happened. It should help the people using it understand what needs to happen next, who it belongs to, and what is about to become a problem if nobody moves.
We build with warmth toward the people using the product, transparency about what the system does and does not do, and a bias toward solving problems early rather than explaining them later.
Ben Cormier
Founder & CEO, Purlieu
Founder
Built by people who lived the problem.
Ben Cormier is the founder and CEO of Purlieu. After years spent managing the design and procurement process for commercial interior projects, he understands firsthand the operational challenges Purlieu was built to solve.
But Purlieu was never the product of one person's experience. It has been shaped by the knowledge of professionals who spent years working across commercial interiors, alongside the developers and technical teams who turned those experiences into a connected platform.
That experience also includes the ownership and operation of hospitality properties, giving the team firsthand knowledge of what happens after FF&E leaves the vendor and arrives at the property.
That combination of perspectives matters. Purlieu was developed from inside the workflow, not by outsiders studying the industry from a distance. The guiding idea has stayed the same: bring together real-world experience, listen to the people doing the work, and build technology that removes unnecessary effort and gives good people more room to do their best work.
Purlieu is the result of many people's skills, experience, and ideas coming together around a shared goal: build a better way to run commercial interior projects.
What's next
We're still building it the same way.
Purlieu continues to develop the way it started, by paying attention to the people doing the work and solving operational problems that genuinely cost them something.
Listen to the people doing the work
The best ideas still come from the person who has to run the project on Monday morning.
Solve the real problem
We would rather remove a source of friction than add something that only demonstrates well.
Protect the workflow
Every addition has to make the way work moves clearer, not heavier.
You can see where that has taken us across the platform, and how it applies in hospitality, healthcare, education, and retail.
If this sounds familiar, we should talk.
If your team has outgrown spreadsheets, disconnected systems, and processes held together by individual memory, we'd love to learn how you work and show you what we've built.