Home Plans

Design Basics: Her Home Magazine’s Mother Company

OUR HISTORY As a leader in the stock home plan industry, Design Basics Inc. 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, builder as well as 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, offering a variety of home plans as well as associated 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 – “Bringing People Home.”

OUR MISSION Where you find our company name, you will usually find our mission statement, Bringing People Home. At Design Basics we don’t just design and sell home plans. We’re a company with many facets – from publishing to land planning – and each plays a part in fulfilling our corporate mission. We understand that every time someone builds a Design Basics home we become a part of a dream fulfilled. We don’t take that responsibility lightly. “Bringing People Home” means that we continue to improve with every design we produce, creating places where people will want to live – places that people will be proud to call “home.”

HOME PLAN DESIGN Design Basics offers a wide variety of products and services in addition to our home plan designs. Still, our home plans are the most important thing we provide our customers. We have five collections of home plans that serve as the heartbeat of Design Basics: Gold Seal™ Home Plans, Heartland Home Plans™, Nostalgia Home Plans™, the Hometown collection and Neighborhood in a Box. Each of these collections were designed in-house with the purpose of targeting specific needs and wants of builders and home buyers alike.

PUBLISHING & MARKETING Our publishing capabilities – both for our own marketing needs, as well as for outside clients – are certainly a strong asset at Design Basics. We regularly publish a number of direct-mail publications throughout the year in addition to several plan books and scores of advertising and promotional materials. Most of our own publications are mailed directly to the home building trade and a number of our plan books are nationally distributed through bookstores. We employ an award-winning marketing and publishing staff with qualified research, writing, editing, production and list management personnel. This staff includes a knowledgeable and creative graphic arts department with complete design, layout and pre-press capabilities. In addition to the publications we produce in-house, our plans appear in hundreds of newspapers throughout America in syndicated “home of the week” features. On an even larger scale, Design Basics plans are featured regularly in national shelter magazine titles such as Woman’s Day Favorite Home Plans, Home Magazine’s Home Plans, House Beautiful Houses & Plans, Good Housekeeping Home Plans, Country Living Dream Homes, Better Homes and Garden’s Home Plan Ideas and Traditional House Plans, Home Planner Magazine, HomeStyles Magazine and others.

AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS A more innovative design strategy is employed in our work with other home design firms through agency relationships. In such arrangements, Design Basics becomes the exclusive publisher and marketing agency for other home plan design companies. Our success with agency relationships can be attributed to finding high-quality design firms who have previously received little or nothing in the way of national exposure. By casting the spotlight on these companies who complement our designs, we’ve gained market share and have launched these affiliate designers into the national arena.

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.