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Introducing CabinetDesigner.ai and the new BarkerCustom.com — let’s build this together
Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on something for a long time, and I’m excited to finally invite this community inside.
Today, we’re opening CabinetDesigner.ai and the completely new BarkerCustom.com experience running on it.
I own BarkerCustom, and I’m developing CabinetDesigner.ai. These are two connected projects with different jobs—and a shared ambition: to make it easier to take a cabinet idea, understand it, improve it, and turn it into something real.
This is our first public soft launch. We’re starting here because I want the people who actually design, buy, install, and build cabinets involved while we’re creating it.
There will be bugs. There are unfinished areas. We’re going to change things.
But there is already something you can use, and I want you to see both what we’ve built and where I hope we can take it together.
Why I started building this
Cabinet design and cabinet manufacturing involve a lot of the same information, but that information often gets recreated at every step.
Someone designs a kitchen. Someone else rebuilds the details for a quote. Those details become an order. Then they’re interpreted again for engineering and production.
Meanwhile, people discuss the project through screenshots, drawings, PDFs, and written explanations. Those help, but the actual design usually stays inside the software where it began.
I want to connect more of that process.
The long-term goal is for the cabinet project itself to carry useful information through:
Design → Share → Improve → Source → Order → Manufacture
We haven’t completed that entire chain. It is the direction guiding what we build.
Our mission is to build an open community and workspace where anyone can design better cabinetry, learn from other designers, and turn those designs into real cabinets.
I want to shorten the distance between an idea and a finished cabinet.
CabinetDesigner.ai is the platform
CabinetDesigner.ai is intended to become a common design workspace for the cabinet industry.
That includes homeowners planning their first kitchen, professional designers, contractors, remodelers, builders, dealers, cabinetmakers, and manufacturers.
We’re starting with the cabinet systems we know best. But the goal goes beyond one manufacturer and one construction method.
Over time, we intend to expand into additional systems, including frameless/full-overlay, face-frame/full-overlay, and inset cabinetry, and bring other manufacturers and cabinet lines into the platform.
A professional should eventually be able to work in a familiar design environment across participating manufacturers, using each manufacturer’s actual products and rules.
A homeowner should be able to learn, explore, and develop a project without having to become a software expert first.
That broader workspace is why CabinetDesigner.ai exists separately from BarkerCustom.
BarkerCustom is manufacturer number one
BarkerCustom is a real cabinet manufacturer, and it is the first manufacturer operating on CabinetDesigner.ai.
BarkerCustom is moving forward with this new experience. Our manufacturing background is one of the reasons we can attempt it.
When you design with BarkerCustom, you’re working with actual BarkerCustom cabinet products, dimensions, options, materials, finishes, pricing, and ordering rules.
The goal is to connect designing your space with configuring and ordering the cabinets that will actually go into it.
Owning both projects gives us a practical advantage during development. We can test the platform against real products, customer questions, pricing decisions, and factory requirements.
We’re already beginning to validate the production side inside BarkerCustom, using our own factory as the proving ground before we ask other manufacturers to rely on it.
We know what happens after someone clicks “Order.”
We manufacture the cabinet.
That experience lets us work backward from what the factory needs, then ask whether the design software is capturing the right information clearly enough.
BarkerCustom is our first manufacturer and our real-world proving ground.
One workspace, with manufacturers kept separate
Here’s how the three pieces fit together:
CabinetDesigner.ai is the platform and design workspace.
BarkerCustom.com is the first manufacturer connected to it.
CabinetForums.com is where we can discuss, teach, troubleshoot, and build on what we learn.
The larger account model is straightforward: one CabinetDesigner identity, one design workspace, and one professional subscription that can work across participating sites.
A designer shouldn’t eventually need a completely different design application for every cabinet manufacturer.
At the same time, each manufacturer needs to remain an independent business with control over its information.
Participating in this ecosystem must not give one manufacturer access to another’s private projects, customers, orders, pricing systems, production files, or backend. Manufacturer access will be permission-controlled.
The shared workspace connects people with products and capabilities they’re allowed to use. Confidential business information remains separate.
Design it. Share it. Improve it. Build it.
This is the part I’m especially excited to develop with CabinetForums.
We don’t just want people sharing pictures of cabinet designs. We want people sharing the designs themselves.
You can now open a shared room, explore the actual design, and select Use this design to save an independent copy to your own BarkerCustom account when the owner allows copying. Their original and your existing projects stay unchanged.
A clever island could help someone solve a storage problem six months later. A professional could explain an unusual layout. A homeowner could ask the community to improve a kitchen before committing to it.
That’s the kind of community we’re trying to create.
I think of this as a shared-design approach to kitchen design. People can choose to share useful starting points, let others learn from them, and allow another user to create their own copy and build on the idea. The contributor chooses whether others may reuse it.
Room viewing, embedding, and permitted copying are now available. The broader community library is something we want to grow together.
As more people contribute, more useful starting points become available. As more manufacturers participate, designers could gain more ways to source suitable projects—and manufacturers could connect with more people who want to build them.
The design itself becomes part of the conversation.
Explore the sample kitchen right here
Rotate the room, zoom in, select a cabinet, open doors and drawers, or try the read-only measurements. On a phone, use one finger to orbit and two fingers to pan and zoom. Choose Use this design to sign in on BarkerCustom and save your own starting point, or Open sample in designer to inspect it there.
What is the first thing you would change to make this kitchen work for you? Mention a cabinet number or describe the area you’re looking at so we can follow along.
What you can try today
Open the designer and explore the sample kitchen. Change a cabinet, work through a layout, and see how the individual choices fit into the room.
Look at cabinet dimensions and available options. Explore the 3D views, open doors and drawers, and try the measurement controls.
Here are three individual cabinets to explore. These examples show starting configurations; use a configured cabinet’s own Share menu to preserve your choices.
B1D1DR — a door-and-drawer base cabinet
Look at how the door, drawer, and interior fit together. Where would you use this cabinet, and what would you store in it?
B3DR — a three-drawer base cabinetOpen the drawers and consider how you would organize them. What would go in the top drawer, and what would you want room for below?
W2D — a two-door wall cabinetExplore the doors and interior. What sizing or clearance question would you want to work through before choosing wall cabinets?
Individual cabinets have Copy cabinet link and Embed cabinet controls, and shared rooms include Copy room embed. Signed-in forum members with posting permission can use Insert cabinet or room in the forum editor to add an approved BarkerCustom viewer. Ordinary links are welcome too.
Cabinet ordering is being rolled out separately. The current checkout is a preview, with no real payment or production order submitted. I’ll announce when ordering opens.
We’ll also continue adding cabinets and refining the catalog as the rollout progresses.
Free to design. Pro to design professionally.
A homeowner should never have to subscribe to professional software simply to design a cabinet project or purchase cabinets.
That’s the purpose of the Free experience: Design & Buy. You can use the core design experience without a paid professional subscription, within the Free account limits. Cabinet ordering is being rolled out separately, but when it opens, a Pro subscription will not be required to purchase cabinets.
For people who use cabinet design as part of their work, CabinetDesigner Pro is available today for $39.95 per month.
Design Professionally.
Pro is for designers, contractors, remodelers, builders, dealers, and cabinet professionals who need more from their workspace. It gives professional users access to the expanded CabinetDesigner toolset and higher account allowances, with additional capabilities continuing to be developed around how people actually use the platform.
This is the first version of Pro. I want to develop it alongside the people using it. Project and room management, useful drawings and presentations, reusable starting points, advanced design tools, and visualization are areas we’re continuing to develop. I’m not suggesting every item on that roadmap is finished today.
You’re subscribing to CabinetDesigner Pro, not “BarkerCustom Pro.”
Your Pro subscription travels with your CabinetDesigner account and gives you professional design access across CabinetDesigner.ai and BarkerCustom.com. As we add manufacturers and cabinet systems, the goal is for those tools to travel with you across participating sites.
The manufacturer is a separate layer. BarkerCustom is simply the first.
I want to build a common design workspace for the cabinet industry. If cabinet design is part of your work, I’d love for you to become one of the first Pro users and help shape it. If you’re designing your own kitchen, start with Free.
Both groups matter to what we’re building.
From design into manufacturing
For the cabinetmakers and manufacturers reading this, there’s another part of CabinetDesigner.ai that I’m particularly excited about.
We now have a working manufacturing exporter and panel optimizer, and we’re beginning to use them internally at BarkerCustom.
The goal is for the information created during design to continue downstream, rather than having someone recreate the cabinet in separate manufacturing software. That means resolving a configured cabinet into its parts and manufacturing requirements, then carrying that information into production.
We’re approaching an important milestone: testing this workflow on an actual BarkerCustom production project, including using CabinetDesigner-generated manufacturing data to generate the CNC code used for production.
Design → Parts → Optimize → CNC → Build
That first project will let us compare what the software produces with what happens in the factory: the parts we cut, how they assemble, and where we need to correct our assumptions. Generating output is one milestone. Proving it through real production is the next.
The initial manufacturing offering we’re developing is aimed at shops that need cabinet parts, bills of materials, cut lists, panel optimization, material requirements, cutting diagrams, and labels.
Beyond that, we’re developing deeper production capabilities around CNC output and machine-specific post-processing, combining orders into production batches, optimizing material across jobs, and eventually coordinating work across different CNC machines and saws.
The manufacturing tools are not available for outside shops to purchase today. They’re entering internal production testing at BarkerCustom first.
We have our own factory, machines, materials, and production work to test against. I want to use that opportunity before asking another shop to rely on our output. Once we’ve validated the workflow internally, we intend to invite other shops to help test and develop it further.
This is why BarkerCustom matters so much to the platform. It gives us a place to prove the connection between a cabinet on someone’s screen and the machines that make its parts.
The community side brings people together to design, share, and improve a project. The manufacturing side is beginning to carry that work toward something we can actually build.
Come use this and help us build it
I’m opening this here because the people in this community bring experience we need.
You know what homeowners struggle to understand. You know what slows down a design appointment, complicates an installation, or causes trouble in a shop.
Tell me what works. Tell me what’s confusing, what you love, what you hate, and what’s missing. Show me where the software gets in your way.
Try CabinetDesigner.ai. Explore the new BarkerCustom.com. Create something and share a cabinet or room. Try opening someone else’s shared work, and use an allowed copy as a starting point for your own project.
Professionals: take a look at Pro and tell me what would make it more useful in your work.
Cabinetmakers and manufacturers: tell me what your shops would need before this could become part of your process.
You don’t need a polished design to participate. A rough layout, a practical question, or an idea worth exploring is enough.
Design it. Share it. Improve it. Build it.
What would you like to create first?
— Chad Barker
Start Designing — Free · Explore CabinetDesigner Pro — $39.95/mo · Explore BarkerCustom
Want to reach me directly?
You’re welcome to ask questions here in the forums, or email me directly if you need help:
- CabinetDesigner.ai: chad@cabinetdesigner.ai
- BarkerCustom: chad@barkercustom.com
— Chad Barker
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This discussion was modified 6 days, 1 hour ago by
Chad.
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This discussion was modified 5 days ago by
cabinetdesigner.ai
CabinetDesigner.ai — Your space, down to the details
Design your cabinets and your room in one connected workspace. One account across CabinetDesigner.ai and BarkerCustom.
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BarkerCustom Beta 0.1.2 — Here’s what we’ve been working on
October 7, 2026
I wanted to give everyone an update on what we’ve been working on since opening up CabinetDesigner.ai and the new BarkerCustom.com.
A lot of this work comes down to making the designer more useful when you move beyond a single cabinet and start putting an actual kitchen together: cabinet runs, corners, finished ends, appliance openings, and all the little details that need to work together.
BarkerCustom Beta 0.1.2 is now live at BarkerCustom.com. The version appears beneath the BarkerCustom logo. If you already have the designer open, refresh the page to load the update.
Work with an entire cabinet run
You can now combine compatible single-door and double-door wall cabinets, equalize their door widths, and resize them as a group.
You can also copy and paste the whole group, combine it with another group, and keep working on the larger run.
For example, try placing a few wall cabinets beside one another at matching height and depth. Select them, choose Equalize door widths, and then Combine. From there, drag the group’s width handle or click its dimension to enter an overall size.
That’s the kind of workflow I want to keep improving: fewer repetitive adjustments when you’re trying out a layout.
We also fixed problems with sizing accuracy, incomplete group copies, and entering group dimensions in 3D. Pasting a whole group now takes one Undo step to reverse. If a particular front arrangement can’t be combined correctly, the designer explains why.
Try this on a computer for the full editing experience.
More cabinets—and more of the pieces around them
The catalog now includes 75 cabinet and finishing product definitions.
New additions include 45-degree base, wall, tall, and sink cabinets, along with bar-back panels, thick and panelized finished ends, and horizontal fillers. The Aventos flip-up wall cabinet options are also available.
We’ve been working through the details around those cabinets, too: fillers, island and peninsula backs, toe skins, molding returns, corners, changes in cabinet depth, and built-in refrigerator openings.
These details matter. A layout needs to make sense beyond the cabinet boxes, and we’re continuing to improve how the designer places and shows those finishing pieces.
Take a closer look at how the cabinets work
Guests and Free accounts can now select Ultra and Maximum detail, including supported Blum hardware previews and animation.
I want people to be able to explore the construction and understand what they’re looking at. Try the higher detail settings on a supported cabinet, open the doors or drawers, and take a closer look.
On a small phone, cabinet configuration and shared-room viewing are still the main workflows. For full room editing, use a computer.
Share something we can actually explore
The shared-design idea remains a big part of what we’re building.
You can explore the sample kitchen and select Use this design to save an independent copy in your account. For personal shared rooms, the owner chooses whether copying is allowed. Your copy does not change the original.
If you’ve built something interesting—or gotten stuck on a layout—share it here. Logged-in forum members can use Insert cabinet or room to add an approved BarkerCustom cabinet or room embed to a post.
We don’t just want people sharing pictures of cabinet designs. We want people sharing the designs themselves.
A useful starting point, a better corner solution, or a cabinet arrangement someone else hadn’t considered can make this community more valuable for the next person.
Progress behind the scenes in the shop
We’re also continuing to connect the design information to our own manufacturing workflow.
This update adds internal tools for combining orders into production batches, reviewing optimized sheets, organizing saw and CNC work, and storing production files and labels.
These remain staff-only beta tools while we validate them in our shop. This is not the public launch of a Manufacturing subscription.
Generating output is one milestone. Proving it through real production is the next.
Give it a try and tell me what you find
Your saved projects and historical quote records were retained. Geometry and automatic finishing improvements can affect a new estimate, so review the finishing notes and current cart when revisiting a design.
This is still a beta. We’re going to find things that need work, and I want to hear about them.
Try building a cabinet run. Explore the higher-detail hardware. Start with the sample kitchen and make it your own. Then post what you made—or tell us where you got stuck.
If something goes wrong, include Beta 0.1.2, your device and browser, the cabinet code if relevant, and the steps that led to the problem. A screenshot or shared design helps us understand it. Please keep private customer and account information out of public posts.
And if you design or build cabinets professionally, tell me what would make this more useful in your everyday work.
Design it. Share it. Improve it. Build it.
— Chad Barker
Chad@CabinetDesigner.ai
Chad@BarkerCustom.comA look at Beta 0.1.2
