Built by flippers who needed a better way to source.
We still buy, restore, and sell furniture ourselves. FlipMate came directly from years of chasing listings, missing deals, and building a system that finally solved the sourcing bottleneck for our own business.
Seattle-area furniture flippers focused on sofas, sectionals, and premium seating
John has been flipping since 2017, Kevin since 2020
More than 3,000 pieces moved between us
How we got here
We're John and Kevin, the founders of FlipMate.
John got his start in property preservation, clearing out foreclosed and distressed homes. Again and again, he saw quality furniture being thrown away simply because no one wanted to deal with it. Instead of hauling everything to the dump, he started selling the pieces that still had life in them. Later, while working in real estate, he saw the same pattern from the seller side: people preparing a home for market would let valuable furniture go for a fraction of what it was worth just to get it out of the house.
Kevin came into the business during COVID, starting out of his garage and quickly growing into a dedicated storage unit. Outside of flipping, he works in motorsports as a professional race car driver, rally instructor at DirtFish, and test driver for brands including Acura and Toyota. We met through our shared passion for rally racing and other motorsports, then realized we'd been chasing many of the same deals without even knowing it.
Why we work well together
Kevin is operational, strategic, and disciplined. He's always refining the process, finding better acquisition channels, and figuring out where the real leverage is.
John is technical and relentless. When there's a repair problem no one seems to have solved, he'll keep testing until he finds a method he trusts, whether that means restoring difficult leather finishes or reverse-engineering discontinued parts and 3D printing replacements.
That mix shaped how we built our flipping business, and eventually, how we built FlipMate.
Why we built FlipMate
Every flipper runs into the same problem: sourcing never stops. If you're not checking listings constantly, you miss deals. But if you're busy doing the actual work, pickups, cleaning, repairs, photos, listings, and deliveries, you can't be glued to a feed all day.
We kept falling into the same cycle: spend a week or two heads-down running the business, then scramble to source once inventory got low. During those gaps, great inventory was going to whoever happened to be watching in real time.
At some point, it became obvious that sourcing couldn't stay manual. So we built software for ourselves.
What FlipMate is today
Over the last few years, that internal tool turned into FlipMate: a system designed to help identify profitable inventory, reach out to sellers, and secure pickups without requiring constant attention.
Today, FlipMate is our primary sourcing method. We still do the real-world work ourselves. We still pick up, clean, repair, list, and deliver. We just source inventory far more efficiently than we ever could by hand.
We're opening it up because the problem it solves isn't unique to us. Serious flippers everywhere face the same tradeoff: spend hours hunting for inventory, or spend that time doing the work that actually makes money.
Want to see how FlipMate works?
Explore how we approach sourcing, scheduling, and pickups, or apply for early access if you want to bring the same system into your own flipping business.