Overview
Hershy Decks is a portable deck manufacturer. Decks are built by hand at its facility, loaded onto a truck, and delivered whole to a homeowner's yard. Decades ago, Hershy Decks' original owner taught their technique to anyone who came through their shop in Texas. The result today is a collection of regional manufacturers who all build roughly the same product and share the same problem: they are constrained by how expensive it is to transport a finished deck very far. They share a basic design language but diverge on the details: different stain palettes, different pricing models, different default features and accessories.
Hershy Decks had a direct stake in solving a problem the whole industry shared. Because these decks are built off-site and delivered finished, a homeowner never sees the actual product until it arrives on a truck. Manufacturers had customers who were occasionally surprised by what showed up, not because anything went wrong, but because there was no good way to picture it beforehand. Hershy Decks knew this problem firsthand as a manufacturer itself. They recognized that solving this for themselves could also become a solution they could sell to the entire industry.
The Solution Process, Explained
Hershy Decks was the first manufacturer on the platform, starting from a base built with every configuration tool a manufacturer might need. From there, the same foundation opened to other manufacturers across the industry, each with its own configuration: defaults, pricing, and the small variances that make its decks recognizably its own.
The most visible change is where the experience starts. Most design tools in this category start in a 2D plan view and save the 3D visualization for later. The Hershy Decks visualizer opens directly in 3D: a house, a door, stairs, and a deck sized to that manufacturer's defaults. A dealer can resize it, add a roof, add a screen to make it into a screened porch, or change the height, all without leaving the 3D view. More advanced changes, like adding a wheelchair ramp, lowering the stair profile, or joining two decks to wrap around a corner of the house, happen in a 2D editor and show up back in 3D immediately.
The visualizer isn't just a picture, though. It's wired directly into Hershy Decks' back-end systems, RTO Contracts, their in-house contract portal, and Shed Suite, depending on which one a given manufacturer uses to run its business. Integrations typically go one direction: design it once, hand it off, done. This one goes both ways. A manufacturer's crew often visits the site after the sale to take real measurements, and that's when they sometimes discover a problem the original design couldn't have caught, a support post that would land in front of a window, for instance. Because the integration runs in both directions, that discovery becomes a design change instead of a renegotiation.
Quotes are versioned to support that back-and-forth. Only one version is active at a time; once it drives a purchase, it becomes frozen and read-only, and any further changes become a new revision until it's made active again. That's what lets a manufacturer update a design after a site visit without losing the paper trail a rent-to-own contract depends on.
The platform was also built for mobile phones as the expected tool. A homeowner can design, price, and move toward a purchase entirely from their phone, without ever needing a desktop.
What Hershy Decks has now is a tool that gives its manufacturers a real answer to "what will this actually look like?" built on an integration that keeps working after the sale instead of stopping at it.
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