To-The-Trade with Interior Design Community

What turns a backordered sofa into a lawsuit? Laurie Laizure opens this To-The-Trade episode with a real case: a client suing their designer after a year of delays, cancellations, and a fight over vendor invoices. The delays were normal. The breakdown was trust.Kat Oldershaw (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kat-oldershaw/), founder of kat&co (https://www.katandco.org/) and Back Office Design Support (https://www.backofficedesignsupport.com/) and co-owner of a Napa custom furniture company, handles everything besides design. Her view: clients need someone to translate the industry for them before problems arise. If clients keep asking the same question at the same stage, fix your onboarding. If something happened that you never want to repeat, put it in your service agreement.Laurie shares a client who wanted a September kickoff finished by Christmas. She told him up front it wouldn't happen. A year later, he's a convert. Setting expectations early works.Consistency is Kat's through-line. A contract or welcome guide means nothing if you bend it. Make one exception and clients learn the boundaries are flexible, and the Saturday texts follow.On hiring, Kat and Laurie warn against hiring a version of yourself, and against hiring in a panic before roles are defined. Sometimes the processes need to come first. Laurie adds that AI tools can make costly mistakes, just like people. Kat explains why her Back Office team is US-based and industry-experienced: they speak the language of quotes and POs and may already know your reps.

No guest this time. Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson take the mic for a candid conversation about the business education interior designers need, and rarely get.They start with what's hidden. Plenty of successful-looking designers carry private financial pressure, and some keep client problems quiet out of embarrassment. Nile shares the story of a designer who paid out of pocket on a client issue, then learned their business insurance included errors and omissions coverage all along.Laurie recommends a year-end expense audit. She cut a $600-a-year AI slide tool once other software could do the job. She also shares a template hack: screenshot a design you like on Pinterest, hand it to Claude or ChatGPT with your content and brand colors, and describe what you like about it.One of the strongest ideas: turn your investment guide into an ROI story. Show what rooms cost and what past projects returned. Laurie suggests sending new clients home inspector videos that expose builder-grade mistakes, so they see how a designer's space planning and surface selections protect their investment.Then the conversation turns to showrooms, brands, and reps. Most trade education is loosely tied to a product or stuck in theory. Designers want three actionable takeaways, real talk about profit leaks, J. Peterman-style storytelling about products, and regional sales data that shows what's working. Laurie's "babysitter test" frames it: designers give up family time, parking fees, and billable hours to attend an evening event, and the audience is owed a debt the moment they sit down. Both agree education outsells a sales pitch over time.Laurie challenges the "I didn't pay myself for two years" story that gets applause on stage. If you skipped a salary, explain how. Most designers can't, and many work second jobs to keep their firms going. Her advice to designers in their 20s: start a 401(k). On show houses, including Kips Bay, they agree: never take out a loan for marketing, know your goal, and run the numbers first. Nile's tip for new firms: hire the accountant first.They close with practical AI: building an event portfolio from years of emails, finding lost messages, tracking magazine editors to build relationships, and using Meta's Muse to monitor design conversations.

Megan Reilly, co-founder and owner of West Edge Design Fair, joins Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson to talk about building an "anti-trade show" in Los Angeles and how designers can get more out of every show they attend.Megan previously led marketing for NeoCon and the Architectural Digest Design Show in New York. She launched West Edge in 2013 after exhibitors pushed for a West Coast event. LA's spread-out, car-driven market made that a challenge, so West Edge leans into experience: an airplane hangar at the Santa Monica Barker Hangar with the doors open, familiar trade brands, and undiscovered makers creating bespoke, collectible pieces.The fair is about 70% design trade, with a consumer audience that West Edge sees as part of the process. After the 2025 wildfires, it partnered with Team Palisades to host a Rebuild Connect Lounge that drew about 500 homeowners. Builders, architects, and landscape architects are attending in growing numbers, too.Laurie urges designers to stop shopping smaller shows and start building relationships there, since brand owners and senior leadership are actually accessible. Megan adds that designers should do their homework and reach out to exhibitors ahead of time. West Edge supports that with a trade preview tour, pre-show education and boot camps, and a Friday "Meet Your Mentor" event with three newer industry groups.The hosts also take on brand follow-up. Generic "great seeing you at market" emails are not working. Laurie suggests personal DMs and real engagement when designers tag a brand on social, noting that a designer's post can outperform a local magazine placement. Megan points to West Edge's cloud-based lead scanning, which lets exhibitors follow up the same day.Megan introduces Rising Design, a new competition and 10-episode series featuring six designers with fewer than five years of practice, each building a 10x10 vignette with shop-the-look QR codes. She also speaks candidly about production pressure, including two Canadian exhibitors who withdrew because of tariffs. West Edge runs October 29 to 31. Trade pros and design students get complimentary Friday and Saturday access when they register by October 23.

Brooklyn-based interiors, architecture, and hospitality photographer Regan Wood joins Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson to talk about the part of the design business that most designers pay for and least understand.Regan came to photography as a second career, moving from womenswear designto dog photography to interiors, which she has shot since 2013. She seesphotography as an opaque trade in the same way design is: people work aloneand learn by trial and error. The most common friction point is cost.Because everyone has a camera in their pocket, professional rates surprisepeople, and her advice is to bake photography into the project cost fromthe beginning rather than scrambling for the money at the end. When Nileasks about contacting a photographer at project kickoff to get a number forthe proposal, she says yes, with a buffer for rate increases over a longbuild.On permissions, Regan urges designers to put photography in the agreementand to raise it with homeowners early, so a no does not arrive eighteenmonths in. Nile describes handling it as a matter-of-fact step repeatedacross the investment guide, welcome guide, and a separate permissionssheet. On rights, Regan explains that a photographer can legally license animage commercially, but a property release from the homeowner is required,and retouching a designer's specified products out of a shot is bad form.For designers chasing press, she offers a reality check. Magazines areflooded with submissions, and who took the photos may get an email openedfaster but will not change the answer. Editors decide on the project, thehomeowner, the designer, the art, and the styling, and the most commonrejection notes are that a space does not feel lived in or needs betterart. She points designers toward regional and niche titles where seriouslocal homeowners are already looking.The practical half covers DIY shots for designers who cannot hire yet(natural light only, lights off, tight details and vignettes, skip the wideshots), pre-production, shot list discipline at fifteen to twenty shots aday, shooting opposite the light with a compass and an assistant, mixing inverticals for social and editorial, and bringing five times more floralsthan expected. She also shares her shared-shoot rules after one painful daywith an architect and designer both on set, and makes the case thatstorytelling, not documentation, is what actually wins designers more work.

Marcy Sagel, CEO of MSA Interiors and Designer Bank in Baltimore, has spent 25-plus years building a commercial design practice focused on multifamily, affordable housing, senior living, and student housing, alongside a smaller, personal residential practice. Her conversation with Laurie Laizure centers on one idea: know your numbers before anyone else in the room does.Sagel built Designer Bank, a course platform launching with 13 courses (35 within its first year and a half), after noticing that most design school graduates arrive without Revit training her large architectural partners already require. The courses run from Revit fundamentals through Enscape rendering, because visualization, she says, is what actually gets clients emotionally attached enough to say yes.That same instinct for closing a gap shows up in her approach to commercial interiors. Rather than default to sterile, repetitive commercial finishes, she carves out lounges, cafes, and gaming areas that feel residential, an approach Laurie dubs "resommercial." The goal is not more spending. It is making sure people feel proud of the building regardless of price point.On budgeting, Sagel pushes back hard on the idea that asking a client's budget upfront is manipulative. A budget range, she argues, is simply where two sides start communicating what they actually want, and it is not optional on large commercial jobs, where clients are funded years in advance with no room to ask for more later.She is equally direct about specifying versus purchasing: her firm specifies more than ten million dollars a year in materials her clients never realize she is choosing, from decorative lighting to paint to flooring underlayment. Her signature story: scratching a client's wood floor sample with his own key to prove it was the wrong choice for a high-traffic event space, then sourcing a commercially rated floor for less money than he was already planning to spend.On running the business, Sagel credits delegating to a VP of Operations she trained by bringing her to every client meeting, and credits her entrepreneurs' organization membership for the accountability a CEO does not otherwise get.The episode closes on two points IDC's audience will recognize. Asked if new designers should market themselves before they have projects, Sagel's answer is yes: market who you are as a person. And Laurie names something rampant in the industry, imposter syndrome, pointing out that no contractor waits to get published in a magazine before calling himself a contractor.

Yvonne Christensen didn't plan to build a design partnership. She and her now business partner, Nicole (Nikki), ran separate solo practices for about ten years before an organic collaboration on a Parade of Homes project, taken on while Yvonne was expecting a baby, turned into a full merger three years later. Nearly six years in, Christensen walks through how they structured the partnership to last: merged furniture buying power and joint accounts from the start, separate billing for hours worked in the early years, and a operating agreement they revisit regularly as their roles shift.A year ago they brought on a business coach who typically works with CEOs, meeting weekly for three hours. He's helped them build an organizational chart and forced overdue conversations about financials and communication. Christensen says the biggest surprise wasn't the partnership itself but how much back-end work employees created.The conversation gets specific on pricing. The firm bills hourly for design work until plans go to engineering, then flat fee once square footage is set, reverting to hourly past 18 months. Christensen spends about ninety minutes consulting clients and calls their builder directly to clarify documentation expectations before quoting. Furniture requires full payment before ordering and a second retainer before staging, so clients rarely face a surprise bill at project close.Consistent builder relationships are, in her words, key to staffing and profitability, since repeat work with the same builders cuts the learning curve on subcontractors and allowances. She also shares that furniture and design fees carry comparable profit margins percentage-wise, though furniture produces higher total dollars, and margins vary by builder based on how much oversight a project requires.This year the firm opted out of Parade of Homes for the first time in ten years, taking a deliberate break after years of tight, high-pressure timelines, even though the parade has historically driven strong long-term referrals. Looking forward, Christensen and Nikki are pursuing product licensing, and Yvonne recently joined the Moen Design Council through an organic industry connection. The episode wraps with a few personal notes: her favorite spaces to design are libraries and additional sitting rooms, her belief that a house should always feel personal, and a favorite project on a ranch property in Kanab, Utah, where a client's handful of found rocks set the entire material palette.

Jaclyn Isaac, an interior designer at Donnie Douglas Designs, built Nest Freight, a new freight-and-receiving platform for the trade, after two costly wake-up calls. While seven months pregnant and managing a high-end install in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she discovered her receiver had left boxes unopened for months, resulting in thousands of dollars in damage and a ruined client experience. Separately, a $900 freight quote for $6,000 worth of hand-carved Italian marble tile came back at $3,000 when it was time to actually ship. A friend with a logistics background, now her co-founder, got the same shipment delivered for $541.That gap between quoted and actual freight cost is the core problem Nest Freight solves. Jaclyn says her team sees average savings of $150 to $200 every time they requote a shipment, and the long-term goal is to use collective industry volume to negotiate better group rates directly with carriers.Nest Freight soft launched in March with almost no marketing. Jaclyn's original goal was 100 signed-up firms; the platform is at about 21 so far, entirely through word of mouth. She and Laurie discuss why adoption has been slower than the savings would suggest: most designers have never thought to requote their own freight, and getting a second quote feels like extra work on top of an already full plate.The company has expanded into receiving in New Jersey, Southern California and San Diego, and Florida, matching where most of its current users are based. Jaclyn is direct about what makes receiving hard to get right: pricing transparency, since designers routinely get surprise invoices weeks after delivery, and inspection quality, since a generic warehouse may not catch the kind of damage a designer would flag on a high-end piece. She shares an example of spotting small tears in leather on a studio chair that a standard receiver likely would have missed.The conversation also covers insurance gaps most designers do not consider until something goes wrong, including freight carriers' low default liability caps and receivers not insuring items in storage on a designer's behalf. Jaclyn and Laurie both recommend using AI to review vendor contracts and identify actual liabilities before signing.Jaclyn is offering IDC listeners a discount through Nest Freight, code IDC2026, for one free month.

Christie Leu spent fifteen years as a self-employed fine craft artist before a contractor called her a serial redecorator and asked her to help style his clients' homes. That request became Christie Leu Interiors, now in its 13th year serving Maryland, Northern Virginia, Washington D.C., and the Eastern Shore.Leu traces her business instincts back to age fifteen, when she noticed she was earning about $100 an hour making pottery at night and $1 an hour babysitting during the day. That early awareness of her own value still drives how she prices today: $300 an hour for herself, $110 an hour for her assistant, $150 an hour for drafters. Her take on flat fee pricing is direct. Skipping hour tracking because you charge a flat fee is how designers lose money without realizing it.Much of the conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson traces how directly her art background feeds her design work, from color memory to composition to balancing an off-center fireplace, plus a formative tax seminar at 23 that taught her to read her own numbers from day one.One of the episode's sharpest stories involves a lighting vendor whose polished pitch on lumens and product specs never answered the question Leu actually needed answered: what's the payoff for the designer, and how do I explain the value to my client? She pushed back hard, and the larger lesson holds: vendors chasing designer referrals need to speak to the designer's business reality, not just the product's features.Leu also unpacks a client's comment questioning an email line item on her invoice. Her answer: about 80 percent of her time goes to email, coordinating contractors, tradespeople, vendors, and warehouses so that a twenty-component window treatment order stays on schedule. Actual designing is closer to 8 percent of the job.She closes with a peer group she helped start, built on a business-of-design foundation and still meeting monthly with outside experts, plus a quick lightning round: kitchens and baths are her favorite rooms, gray is the trend she's ready to retire, and murals and window treatments are the splurges she always defends.

Karen Laos learned to negotiate at six, when her dad handed her a few dollars at a flea market and told her to have fun but never pay full price. Twenty-five years into a communication career, she joins Laurie Laizure to talk about the part designers struggle with most: what to say in the seconds after you name your price.Karen has coached at NASA, Google, and other large brands. She left corporate in 2019 to help 10 million women overcome self-doubt and communicate with confidence in 10 years, and she is about halfway there. The turning point was a boardroom where she could not get the words out. Her boss shut down the meeting, then told her she could have simply tabled it. Karen's takeaway was not embarrassment. It was a question: why do I keep asking for permission?The most quotable moment in the episode is a negotiation she ran from a loading dock. An HR contact asked her rate, she gave it, and the line went quiet. Karen let the silence sit, then asked How does that land with you. The answer was that she was significantly higher than other coaches under consideration. Karen said, I recognize that I'm higher than most. Is that a deal breaker? It was not.She also walks through a recent decision to hold a new speaking minimum, turning down $3,500 and a paid trip rather than negotiate against her own word. Within days she met someone on a plane and opened a six-figure conversation. Her framing: your rate is a decision, not a feeling you wait to have. The scary part is the trapeze gap between letting go of one bar and catching the next.Laurie brings it back to design economics. Reverse-engineer the number from salary, rent, overhead, insurance, and retirement, and unprofitable projects stop being emotional decisions. She also raises the scenario designers fight most: a client reverse-images a chair and finds it cheaper online. Karen's answer is to handle it proactively by deciding what you are available for and setting the parameters at the start of the engagement, rather than defending them mid-project.The lightning round delivers the practical layer. The sentences to practice: that doesn't work for me, and I'm not available for that. The word to retire: sorry. The credibility leaks: I think, maybe, kind of, does that make sense. And the cheapest improvement available to anyone, which is recording yourself on a client call and listening back.

You get maybe twenty good photos of a finished install in a year. There are 365 days in the year. What fills the rest? Most designers cycle the same images or go quiet, while the thing clients actually want to see- the process and the reasoning and the real cost- never leaves the designer's head.Shannon Ggem hit that wall for ten years. She posted three times a week and earned roughly one new follower every three months, most of them people she met face to face at trade shows. Then she agreed to be the private case study for a new content system from Laurie Laizure at Interior Design Community. This To-The-Trade conversation is the thirty-day debrief.The first fix was not strategic. Laurie told Shannon to drop the filters, and the numbers moved immediately. In a feed increasingly full of AI-generated talking heads, looking like an actual person is now an advantage.The second fix was scripting, which Shannon resisted hard. Being told to be authentic and then handed a script feels contradictory. The comparison changed her mind: scripted videos are cleaner, shorter, and free of her natural repetition. The workflow is practical. Build the script from your own talking points, edit it in Notes until it sounds like you, paste it into the teleprompter in Edits, record one paragraph at a time, delete bad takes as you go, and curate your photos before you open the app.Shannon's most useful admission is about the times she reverted to her old habits. Those posts took longer and performed worse. Her top two videos in the whole feed were made with no makeup, in pajamas, in about ten minutes.The back half widens out. Laurie tracks what featuring a brand does for that brand, which is fifty new followers at minimum and sometimes 250, and makes the case for naming makers out loud so handcrafted work becomes desirable instead of anonymous. Shannon talks about posting on drawings, a topic she assumed nobody wanted, and finding that clients rebuilding after the fires very much did. Both push toward publishing real timelines and cost ranges alongside the satisfying before and after reels.There is also a good stretch on emotional resistance, which for Shannon disguised itself as a file management problem and nearly killed a post about her first career as a scream queen. That post was a hit.The month ended at 158,800 views and 990 new followers, plus a licensing conversation, a referral, and two paid brand collaborations. IDC is opening the process up to the full community.