Jackie Mosher is a dynamo. You can feel the energy when talking to her. You can imagine the wheels churning in her brain. You can see it in the Instagram videos she posts for her company, Dzinly.
It’s no wonder, then, that the pioneering concept that is Dzinly was born from her innovation, along with her husband, Matt Mosher, starting as a seed in 2014. “Matt and I were on a flight home from a family vacation with our kids,” she says. “We were just talking about business, one thing led to another, and I’ll be darned if we didn’t write this out on a little Wet Nap.”
“Business,” to the Moshers, is the wide world of real estate: Jackie has been in the real-estate industry for more than 20 years, including running her own residential appraisal company; Matt launched his landscape architecture firm, Mosher Design Co., which he launched as a teenager. Together, the pair of serial entrepreneurs realized that there was a very simple need.
The answer: Dzinly (dzinly.com) is the much-buzzed-about Royal Oak-based, nationally reaching virtual technology platform that lets users easily, and affordably, reimagine a home’s exterior before investing time and money on materials, contractors and DIY projects. Launched in 2021, it is revolutionizing the way people view home improvement, literally.
Pay a visit to Home Depot on any given weekend, and you’ll see swarms of shoppers squinting at paint samples, trying to imagine what the colors might look like on their own home’s exterior. Dzinly removes the guesswork from the process — plus so much more.
“In the whole design world, it's sort of an accepted unknown: An architect or designer or whomever will propose a project, and suggest where to put something, what color and so on, and the homeowner has to trust them,” says Jackie Mosher, Dzinly’s COO. “You can throw it on a 2D rendering, but it’s not a true representation of what the project is going to look like. With Dzinly, you don’t have to visualize. All the indecisiveness went away.”
Dzinly not only lets the user see exactly what their home will look like, but they can switch out different colors, different materials, add architectural changes, all with the input of a professional designer guiding the way.
Users begin by uploading a clear image of their project, whether an existing home or a new construction, with detailed notes. “You can add comments and inspirational photos, provide links,” Mosher says. “You can say, ‘I don’t even know what I like, but I know what I don’t want,’ or ‘I already bought this stone but don’t know what to put with it,’ anything you want.” The project then goes to in-house designers, who send back three different pallet renderings within two business days. You can choose one (or additional ones for a fee) and the designer will render the pallet onto your home in one more day.
From there, the software really shows its stuff. “We built this awesome toggle function that not only showcases the designer’s recommendation, but puts the process into the hands of the homeowner,” Mosher says. “They can toggle to add materials, try out colors, and the project never expires. Maybe you like one color, but your husband wants to see it a little darker. You can use the toggle to try a lighter trim, or look at this area in board and batten, this area horizontal — everything is put into a sandbox full of toys, and you can play and toggle as much as you want and you come up with the combination you love. But it’s started off and directed by professional designers.”
Users can chat with their designer, add items to their sandbox, show them Pinterest boards and the designer will track it down. Architectural changes are optional, for a fee — maybe you’re debating whether to add a dormer or a boxed bay window, change the size of a window. The project would first go to an in-house architect and proposed elements would be built onto the rendering.
Once you’ve settled on a winning design, you see that “there’s so much more to this, down to hiring yourself a vetted local architect or contractor to carry out the project,” Mosher says. “Our network is going to be massive. All of our materials and colors are readily available. The project can be shared with anyone, including friends or your own conventional designer. It’s a one-stop shop in every sense of the word.
“Designers, too, can benefit,” she says. “Whether they’re out of San Diego, New York, wherever, it’s an amazing tool for them to promote and excel in their career, expand beyond their local market, which can be difficult to do. We’re creating the largest network of designers nationwide, each going through an in-depth qualification review.”
Although Dzinly began as a passion project on the side of the couple’s many other endeavors, “now it’s a monster that needs to be fed every day,” Mosher says. “We truly build this ourselves, with a full-time tech team. We were involved in every storyboard, every icon, every button, it was all blood sweat and tears — there’s not one thing that we did not purposefully build.”
And it’s far from complete. “Now the train has left the station and it’s picking up speed. There are so many amazing things coming,” she says. “I can’t help but pinch myself, because I know what’s coming, and it’s such an exciting time. I can’t believe we’re here.”
