Sooqna

What does Sooqna do?

Sooqna is what happens when an interior designer, multiple furniture stores and AI become one product. Its AI interior designer, Laya, reads a photo of any room, learns its owner's taste and budget, and designs a complete space in seconds using real pieces from curated independent brands, scaled to fit. Shoppers who prefer to start from a finished look can choose ready-to-buy room sets created by Sooqna's designers.

Either way, the whole room, from multiple brands, is bought in one checkout, then delivered and assembled. Sooqna is led by founder and CEO Amina Bensaid and works with 12 brands today.

The problem

Sooqna's technology was ahead of its operations. Laya could design a full room from multiple brands in seconds, but the marketplace behind it ran on spreadsheets and manual work:

• Catalogues arrived as files. Every product, price and stock update was entered by hand.

• Payments were tracked manually. Commission and brand payouts lived outside any system.

• Human error was built in. For a company built to take the friction out of furnishing a home, the back office was the one part that didn't match the vision.

The tipping point came as Sooqna prepared to launch. Demand arrived from an unexpected direction: brands began asking to join the platform. Each new brand meant more catalogue entry, more commission tracking and more coordination, and scaling that manual work was impossible.

Why PuppetVendors?

Sooqna started fresh, with no prior marketplace platform. The team evaluated options against a clear set of criteria:

• Native to their existing Shopify stack

• Built for curation, not an open marketplace

• Multi-vendor orders in a single checkout

• Self-serve setup

• A responsive support team

They compared GMV-based marketplace platforms, sync-only connectors and dropship networks, and even considered building their own tool. The GMV-based platforms would have cost more than ten times as much over two years, and the sync-only tools were too limited for a high-end product. PuppetVendors answered most of their needs, on pricing they control rather than a cut of every sale.

How they implemented it

Setup took less than a day, and Sooqna went from install to live in a few days, without a developer:

1. Installed the PuppetVendors app on their Shopify store.

2. Created each brand as a vendor.

3. Assigned their catalogue of around 300 products to those brands.

4. Set commission rules and opened vendor portals so brands could manage their own listings.

5. Tested the whole process end to end before going live.

The PuppetVendors support team, including Martin and Vivi, was there every step of the way, and every question was answered thoughtfully.

The biggest challenge was data quality, because an AI designer is only as good as the data it designs with. Laya never guesses a measurement, so every product needs exact dimensions, materials and finishes before it can appear in a room. Onboarding a brand means making its catalogue AI-ready. PuppetVendors' product approval workflow became Sooqna's natural quality gate: nothing reaches the AI until it meets their standard.

Results

• 5x less manual work. Catalogue, pricing, stock and commission work that used to be entered by hand now runs through PuppetVendors and its vendor portals.

• Zero human error. The spreadsheets and manual payment tracking behind the marketplace are gone.

• Growth without headcount. Sooqna now runs 12 brands and around 300 products without an operations team.

• AI-ready data by default. Product approval keeps every listing complete before Laya can design with it.

Her advice to others

Pick an infrastructure that lives natively in your stack, charges on what you control and lets a small team run like a big one.