diff --git a/src/store.ts b/src/store.ts
index 4c7f8a0f..e1033703 100644
--- a/src/store.ts
+++ b/src/store.ts
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ import {
 // =============================================================================
 
 const HOME = process.env.HOME || "/tmp";
-export const DEFAULT_EMBED_MODEL = "embeddinggemma";
+export const DEFAULT_EMBED_MODEL = process.env.QMD_EMBED_MODEL ?? "embeddinggemma";
 export const DEFAULT_RERANK_MODEL = "ExpedientFalcon/qwen3-reranker:0.6b-q8_0";
 export const DEFAULT_QUERY_MODEL = "Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B";
 export const DEFAULT_GLOB = "**/*.md";