Hello and welcome to episode 142 of Design Curious Podcast.
I'm your host and mentor, Rebecca Ward.
Today on the podcast, I have a special guest, Aaron V.
She has so much knowledge and a great product called Style Row
that you're going to be interested in software for
designers to stay very organized.
So let me tell you a little bit more about Aaron.
Aaron is an entrepreneur who started her career at an early
age. Graduating from high school
early, she skipped college and went straight to work.
At the age of 24, she founded her design firm, Aaron V Design
Group, later a furniture brand, Aaron V and most recently turned
software visionary, building a platform to help designers
communicate, present and design as well as discover the best of
luxury design world. And that software is called
Style Row. She has seven licensed
collections, including Hollywood Hills with Baldwin Furniture,
Furniture Line with Universal Furniture and then Bella home
window coverings with Hartman and Forbes Fine Art, handmade
lighting, Rugs with Creative Touch and Robin.
Her work has been featured in many magazines including Elle
Decor, Veranda, Traditional, Home Town and Country House,
Beautiful, Rob Report, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles
Times and others. She has taken her award-winning
design style and turned it into a master class for anyone
looking to upgrade or remodel their home.
She has four horses and resides in Santa Rosa Valley with her
husband. So let's get to her story.
I know you're going to enjoy it. You're now listening to Design
Curious, the place where you, Creative One, are here to learn
about what it really is like to be an interior designer, and I'm
your host and mentor, Rebecca Ward.
If you're worried about how to succeed in a creative career, if
you're ready to learn your next steps to become an interior
designer, and if you want the satisfaction of doing something
you love every day, you are in the right place.
Grab a coffee, a notebook, and let's dig into today's episode.
Hey Aaron, welcome to Design Cures podcast.
It's great to have you here today.
Great to be here. Thank you.
Yeah, we've been trying to connect for a little while, so
it's great to finally get you on the podcast.
For our listeners. I know that Style Row is
definitely going to be something we want to check out.
But before we get there, let's talk about how you became
interior designer. Did you know from an early age
that that's what you wanted to do?
No, not at all. I remember growing up as a young
girl, maybe 5 to 10 years old and just like always liking
homes and like the idea of real estate.
And when I was a kid, I would sketch my perfect horse barn.
I was a horse girl, the lamb. I remember being like probably 8
years old sitting at the kitchen and being like, OK, if I have
the ten horses, I need 10 stalls and how big do those stalls have
to be? And I remember it being like a
real problem that I was trying to solve.
And then I have 10 horses, I need 10 saddles.
So that means my tack room has to be a certain size.
And I was literally couldn't just sketch something random
like most kids probably did. I was like, well, how big does a
stall need to be? And let's go figure this out.
So I was drawing to scale at 8 years old even though.
It still. Didn't even occur to me that
design was a job or I always loved real estate and as a
younger person as I continued growing up, I always thought OK,
I want to have my own company one day.
But I still had no idea what I wanted that to be.
I knew it needed to be like 50% creative and 50% business.
That was as far as I got. I have other entrepreneurs in
your life that kind of inspired you to do that or?
My mom had her own business. She owned company, so it was
like a residential painting company, and she had flipped up
some apartment buildings with a partner of hers back in the 80s.
Before that was really a term. My grandfather had his own
cabinet shop, so he had been a contractor in his younger years
and then a fine cabinet maker in his older years after being a
farmer. So he had multiple careers.
As I look back, everyone kind of had their own business in a way.
They were all doing their thing. And then we moved to LA when I
was 9. And so probably when I was about
18, a friend of my mom's called me up.
She was a headhunter. And she was like, I'm helping
this lady find an assistant and I think you should meet her.
And she's a lifestyle expert. So this is back in, I was
leaving high school, right? So it was like in the late 90s.
And that was when Martha Stewart was exploding on the scene.
The term lifestyle expert was a big thing.
And HGTV was taking over the world.
And I was like, well, I'm not really looking for a job.
I'm trying to actually take the summer off for once because I'd
worked six days a week since I was 13 and never took a day off.
And she was like, no, no, you really need to meet this lady.
I think you guys are totally going to get get along.
I'm like, but I don't want an extra job, Barbara.
Like, why are you forcing this lady on me?
But I went and I met her and she was wonderful.
Her name is Susie Quailo. And I think I was there for two
or three hours at her house, her Home Office, and she wouldn't
let me leave until I took the job.
But I don't need it. What wait best?
But she was amazing. So she convinced me and so I
said yes. And so I said OK, I'll train
horses in the morning and I could come over at 1:00 and be
here till, I don't know, probably 7 or something.
So she said so we did that for a year where I was part time.
She hired another lady full time and she had ATV show on HDTV
that was starting or had been going I guess somewhat
successfully for maybe a period of time, a gardening show called
Surprise Gardener and she wanted to be the next Martha.
That was her goal. I worked for her for that first
year and then I said OK, why don't you come on full time and
let this other lady go and we'll really do this and grow your
business. And so she said OK, so I helped
her produce 2 books with Simon and Schuster on Home Decor in
Style. She had multiple shows on HGTV
and specials and she had a regular contributorship on NBC
on the Today show. And so we were doing holiday
decorating segments and she had had a very extensive television
and media background. So it was a great learning
experience for me, really getting like that, almost better
than a college education in the real world of marketing and PR
and television and production. And it was an incredible 6
years. She wanted to design product
lines, so she landed an incredible licensing agent and
we got a deal with Mervyn's for a bed, bath and tabletop line
big box retailer on the West Coast back then.
Yeah. So it was just great.
And then throughout that process, I stumbled into
decorating my first apartment and another friend of mine came
over and said, wow, your apartment's so great.
This is amazing. You should be an interior
designer. And I was like, what are you
talking about? This is like IKEA and literally
like Susie's old hand me down sofa and some stuff that I found
at the garage sale down the street.
My mom loves garage sales and markets, so we we did that a
lot. She was like, no, your place is
amazing. What are you talking about?
I was like, you're crazy. Doesn't everyone do this?
Doesn't everyone stand up on a ladder and faux finish their
beams back to wood and insist that their landlord paints their
entire apartment and re carpets it and do all these things that
I made this poor man do? And I told him, I said, listen,
when I move out, it's going to rent instantly.
So just do what I say and let me do whatever I want.
And I guarantee you it's going to be way better when you go to
try to rent it again. And it was absolutely that way.
I mean, it had teal carpet. Oh, gosh.
In a teal kitchen. It was tear.
Wow. Mixed all that for him.
And yeah, Then I ended up getting another job through a
friend. The same kind of thing called me
up. I have a job interview for you.
This woman just bought a condo in Tuluka Lake and you should go
interview. And I was like, I know nothing
about figuring out how to get someone's style and design out
of their head and mix it with mine and make it come into the
real world. But anyway, I took the job.
I charged her $25.00 an hour, big money back then and it was
great. And so then I shortly thereafter
was like, OK, I'll be an interior designer.
And I hung a shingle, quit my job.
I had $3000 in my pocket and I just went for it.
So formal training, I got out of high school year early, never
went to college. I figured I could just whatever
I wanted to do, I'd learn on the job.
And I wasn't going to be a doctor or lawyer that needed
that formal education. And I feel the the reality of
being out in the workforce is so much more valuable to most
people than sitting in a classroom, you know, not having
real experiences. Yeah, and it never, it never
hurt your confidence at all, though not having any education
doesn't seem like it did. No, I figured, I mean, of course
there's always that feeling of like, oh gosh, what am I doing?
But even with education, you feel that way.
It's not the real world. Doing anything in a classroom is
completely in a vacuum and and really unrealistic to what you
experience when you suddenly have to do with deal with
people. But I just always knew I'd
figure it out. Was like, hey, why not me?
If other people can do it, I can do it.
And as long as you tell me what's going on, I have a very
good understanding of how things work.
And I, there was a lot of stumbling through like the
business of the business, right? And that's where I feel like I
definitely could have benefited from interning at a firm if I
was going to do it again. That probably would have been a
really smart move. But I didn't like, how do we
bill our clients? What do we charge?
What does a contract look like? And then of course, my design
career spanned about 21 years now, I guess.
So that was like pre Internet almost.
I mean, we were using computers, but it was like word talk, you
know? And then, like, e-mail became a
thing. I used to call the airlines to
book her travel. I remember spending five hours
calling 10 airlines and you'd have to write down like every
single flight option there ever was.
And probably sending. Brazils to delta.com yet?
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, all that, it was
just so manual. Yeah, we definitely stumbled
through all that learning curve in the beginning.
And I didn't really have design friends in the beginning either.
It can be a very isolating career, right?
Because it's like you're your own little shop and from maybe
your suppliers, right? Or showrooms that you shop from
or whatnot. So I started years into it,
really starting to make some good design friends and then
asking them, how do you do this? What do you do?
I feel like a little fraud sometimes.
What the hell am I doing? And they're like, oh, we do too.
And I was like, you feel that way too.
You're so amazing thing. And they'd be like, Oh no,
that's normal. So I'll pull the chair and
encourage people to just ask questions.
If you don't understand what someone's talking about, ask,
because that's the first way you're going to get off the
rails and ask for help, right? And be willing to share.
Share your experiences, share what goes wrong as much as you
share what goes right. And I think when you're willing
to be open and really express your frustrations, your
concerns, your mishaps, those things, then you realize that
you're not alone. And other people go through that
too. And it breaks down all those
facades that I feel like people can very often try to put up.
And those facades don't really get any of us anywhere.
Yeah, it's transparency is really the key to getting ahead
because no one expects you to know everything.
There's so much to know with interior design that it's
impossible to be the person who knows it all.
It's with the community that you can really get ahead.
So that's. Yeah, completely.
Yeah, great advice. So then how did you get into
having a furniture brand? Well, when I was working for
that other lady, Susie, I was sketching furniture for her.
She wanted to have a furniture collection, so she just like
designed some furniture and I was like, OK, so that just felt
very natural. My grandfather was a cabinet
maker, so I grew up in his wood shop watching him make cabinets.
I made a Barbie sofa out of scrap wood as a kid, Barbie
sofa. So she had a nice little wooden
on beans bleached. Stain, you know.
Like piece of wood, which I also think it's funny when I look
back, like I would make a birdhouse or a dollhouse.
Barbie got a new sofa. Yeah, I always liked furniture.
And I started making custom pieces for my clients.
My first real client with a fabulous house and a real
budget. I just felt like, well, I can
make you better stuff than I'm finding in the stores that fits
your home properly and honestly at a better price.
So being like a custom sofa, custom cabinets, custom tables,
it just made sense to me to go that route.
And one of the ladies on his job, she was kind of the GC.
She was really cool and she connected me to a wonderful
cabinet maker and furniture maker in Los Angeles.
And we still use him today in 20 years later, probably he still
makes some case goods for us frequently.
I just like going down to the work rooms in the wood shop and
going through that process with the Craftsman and craftswoman.
I felt like that was just exciting and inspiring and fun
and cool and I like knowing how things are made.
I think understanding the functionality of materials, be
it in the home itself or in the furniture, it feels more
rewarding to me to understand that versus just like picking
paint colors and toss pillows. So I'm very much more like a
builder designer than just an interior decorator.
And I love designing furniture. I think that it's a hard
business, but it's a passion. And that also led me to have my
first furniture showrooms at a 5000 square foot showroom on
Robertson Blvd. in LA Did that for three years.
That was an incredible experience as well.
And very quickly was like, OK, I don't want to be in the showroom
business. I'll let somebody else do that
front end, I'll design and we will go into the trade only
model. So our line is represented in
eight or nine showrooms around the country, trade only.
And that's been a much better fit.
And it's really fun to see other designers custom order the
pieces and change the colors and the shapes and the finishes and
see their creativity on top of my designs.
It's really fun to see. Yeah, So you're still producing
new collections every year? No, we don't do it every year.
We probably should, but with all the other balls that I'm drunk
constantly. We release new product probably
every two years, but it's new for new finishes regularly.
So yeah, it's a capsule collection.
And then I, I have a probably 7 or 8 licensed collaborations
with other companies as well for different types of products.
So hardware. I did their Hollywood Hills line
and Bella Home. Universal Furniture have
furniture lines that I designed with them that are at high
point, different price point, non custom retail focused.
Hartman and Forbes. I recently launched A
collaboration with them for beautiful window coverings,
rugs, we've got Maribon and Creative Touch.
So yeah, quite a few different product collaborations.
Yeah, that's wonderful. Are you dreaming of launching
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Your business won't launch itself, so let's do this
together. And so then you pivoted into
software technology, so somehow came up with Style Row.
Was it because of your own project management needs in your
company? Is that what brought it on?
You got it. Constantly looking for ways to
make things better. A best friend jokes that I'm the
president of the Make it Better committee so anything can be
made better. Be it the restaurant we're at,
the food we're eating, the trip we're taking.
Certainly your home environment. I'm like coming up with ideas
for that. And as I mentioned, and we
started chatting like the, you know, I watched the business
landscape and the tools we use daily in work changed so
dramatically in the last 20 years.
And suddenly e-mail is our 90% communication tool, right?
Not telephone anymore, or even fax.
So suddenly there were just so many ways and places to
communicate about work. Text threads, Instagram,
WhatsApp, Facebook, Pinterest. And I found that information was
just everywhere. In the studio, in your phone, in
your laptop. There was no one place to look
for your point of truth, or for your communication with your
team, or for your communication with your vendors or for your
communication with a client. Most importantly, I felt like it
was just kind of a disaster. There's stuff literally
everywhere. Because I'd be like, OK, well,
when did she change her mind about XYZ?
Nobody knew. When did they say they wanted
pink instead of blue? Like, let's go back and read
that. Where was that message?
Was it on? Was it on Pinterest?
Was it an e-mail? Was it an e-mail called Sofa?
Was it an e-mail called paint color?
From pink to blue? Course not, right?
And they'll call vacations from Sunday.
People just put stuff everywhere.
Yeah. You would spend so much time
just looking for answers and looking for that point of truth.
Truth and collaborating or gathering documents and data and
and copying and pasting and copying and pasting and
spreadsheets, which are a nightmare and no one should be
managing in spreadsheets because it's the first way to lose your
mind and money. There's got to be a better way.
Clearly we are doing it wrong. After close to 20 years in
business, I was like, we have to be doing this wrong.
And in time, my furniture brand needed a new software system
too. And I'm like, there's nothing
great for furniture brands or showrooms.
There's certainly nothing great for designers.
But let me go and try everything.
So I started asking all my design friends, what do you use?
What do you use? Oh, I use design studio or
studio designer. I use design manager.
I use Ivy. I use this.
I use that. And I was like, well, do you
like it? Is it great?
And they were like, Oh no, it's terrible.
I mean, the consensus across all of them was that they might
technically provide some support, but that they were
terrible experiences, generally hard to use.
And being the president of the Make it Better committee, the
last thing I want to sign up for is something that's hard to use
and generally terrible. That just sounds like a mess.
So I did, I tried them all. We spent several years and a lot
of time and effort going, OK, well, this solution must make
our lives easier. This one's got to be making our
lives easier. Somewhere here, one of these is
going to make our business better, make us more efficient,
make us more profitable, make it more fun to do the boring
management stuff that everybody needs to do.
And at the end of the day, they cost us more time, more money,
more effort. And it was a miserable
experience to use the software. It was hard, confusing.
It wasn't intuitive. It felt like it was designed in
the 80s by accountants because most of them were.
And I was like, well, this is dumb.
I'm not going to use this stuff, but what do I do?
Where do I go from here? And at the same time, we were
using a sauna and base camp and all these more easy to use,
intuitive, better pieces of software layered on top.
We were still in Excel, we were still in Dropbox, we were still
using Pinterest. We were still emailing every
day. We were still text messaging.
We were still getting stupid messages from clients on
WhatsApp and Instagram all hours of the day.
So although those pieces of software that are industry
specific maybe were better accounting workflows, 90% of
what we do was still unaccounted for and we were still shotgunned
around the office. We were still using 10 different
pieces of software to actually do our work, let alone Ryan.
Talk about drafting, right. But just the rest of it.
So yeah, it was like, OK, well, I guess I'll raise some money
and start a software company. So I did.
I have several friends that have software companies, so they took
me under their wing and helped me get started and figure out
who to talk to and how this works.
And again, I like knowing how things are built.
I'm clearly an entrepreneur at heart and have no problem
starting something and find that part really exciting and, and
fun. And at the end of the day,
working on or building workflows is the same as building a house
in many ways, right? It's the same plan, same
strategy. You apply the same principles to
that business as you do to any other.
Clearly, they're very different, but that's what I did.
So we raised about 15,000,000 in venture capital, have built some
incredible software for the last seven years and have thousands
of design firms using it, running their businesses off of
it. And is it as robust an
accounting system as some of these others?
Absolutely not. It's just not.
But can a design firm completely run their entire business out of
it and sync to QuickBooks? For sure.
And I don't know about you, but I don't need to export my data
85 different ways like we just got that.
But what we do have that others don't is the most incredible
client dashboard, client portal, where it truly streamlines all
your client feedback communication.
Nobody texts me anymore. I don't get 85 emails from
clients. They put everything in the
client dashboard and everyone on my team can see it.
And that saves me hours and hours and hours of time because
I'm no longer regurgitating data to my team and longer copying
and pasting into spreadsheets. I'm no longer doing all of these
wasted workflows because we use Style Row and because the way it
was built was to truly streamline your communication
for your team first and then your communication to your
client second. And we built really robust
software that does that. And the best part is clients
love it. They don't want 8000 emails new
over 2 years. They don't want spreadsheets and
Dropbox links and Pinterest links.
I mean, think about the client side.
All the mess and the nightmare that I've been explaining as a
designer, it's just as bad if you're the client.
Like, why would you want to sign your client up for a bad
experience? We need this referral business.
We need them to be thrilled. We need them to hire us again
and refer us to their friends. And so if you feel your process
is clunky on your side, put yourself in your client's shoes
for a minute. And all the things I tried to
do, like figure that out. What are we spending?
What's been ordered? What did I approve think fabric
we ordered. I want to show my friend, most
workflows that designers are doing are not actually built to
set their client up for success. And they're not certainly not
built for that client to share your beautiful designs with
their friends and their friends are going to be your new
clients. Client dashboard is so you can
put anything in it, site photos, inspiration, images, products,
PDFs, drawings, invoices. We send everything to our client
through that. We do not e-mail them anything.
We do not text them stuff. We do not send them random links
to things like everything is in style row.
So they can just go there anytime they want and see it
all. And yet as a designer, you
control what your client sees as well.
The name, the price, the downloads, you can turn it all
off. You can turn versions of that on
and off. So it's highly customizable, I
don't waste my time doing a ridiculous PDF presentation.
It's a huge time suck and at the end of the day, you don't ever
use it again. So I spend 8 or 10 hours in
Keynote and then I have to version a new version and e-mail
it and change it and e-mail it, Change it and e-mail it, Change
it and e-mail it, change it and e-mail it again.
That client just received 10 PDFs from you.
How to which one was real and right?
It's a huge waste of time for everyone.
So our client dashboard completely circumvents that and
we just don't do it. We don't create physical
presentations. We don't layer sofas and light
fixtures on a little PowerPoint slide.
Now you can export from Style Road to PowerPoint.
So for those. So really, really that is a
crucial part of their process. But I'd challenge you to see if
it really is because we just don't do that anymore.
We don't create purchase orders and send them to vendors.
It's ridiculous. We don't create PDFs and send
them to our clients. It's ridiculous.
In Style Row, they can have four or five images of the one chair.
It's a carousel. They can have four or five
images of the rug of all these products.
So it's actually a much better client experience to get to
products that way like you would online.
Everyone's used to that format and Style Row allows you to do
that. Plus, it allows me as a manager
and owner to keep an eye on my projects to see what my clients
and my teams are talking about because I can see all their
communication. And I get trigger emails when my
client responds or when my team changes its status on something.
So I know when people are working and I know what's been
changed and how it's gone. And I can jump in at any point
on a thread if I want and say no, no, we're doing this.
And you can't do that when your team is emailing people without
you. And that's where things can also
go off the rails. The team member leaves, right?
And suddenly you're like, Oh my gosh, what did they say and do?
Well, we communicate only on a style row.
And so if your team changes, it becomes really, really easy to
just have seamless, uninterrupted business.
So it becomes that point of truth for my firm.
And yeah, and I love. It makes a lot of sense, and one
of the things I really love too is that it allows the client to
maintain that excitement in the process because they can always
go back and look at. The Beautiful.
Boards and it's just there and they can show it off like you
said, when their friends come over like, oh, you're redeeming
your house, so let's see like what your designers done and so
they can go and check it out. Yeah.
So is it an app or is it a platform that they get emailed
notifications or how did they make sure they see what it is
that you're communicating to them?
Yeah. So it's a web-based platform,
so. And then there is a mobile app
or it's mobile optimized, I should say, particularly the
client dashboard with photo extensions for iOS.
So if you're going to trade shows, you can download our
photo extension and then quickly upload photos into digital
library on Style Row. So everything you put in a
project is also being saved in your library so that when you do
that next project, it becomes really quick to just build out
your design. So there's definitely a lot of
efficiencies. The more you use it, the more
there we have export to XLS well.
So if you need to get the lighting fixture schedule or all
the products that you purchased exported to an Excel, that takes
seconds, not hours. And so designers, yeah, sign up
for an account and then you make some products or items visible
to your client and you just put their e-mail address in the
platform and it sends them a nice little invitation e-mail.
They don't have to create an account or login.
They literally just put in their name because there's
communication, you need to know who is chatting with you and
that's it. So then they just have that link
and they can save that link on their phone.
Looks like an app, right? So it's like a QikLink.
So they can do that. Otherwise, we usually send them
an invitation e-mail, but we draft and we put the link right
there and the subject is like your style row account so that
they can always find it. But then once they've accepted
and they click in and they put their name, it's now or you're
synced in that way. So any messages I send from the
Style Row platform in our little messages box, you hit enter,
it's sending a trigger e-mail to your client saying your designer
just commented on this chair in this room in this project.
And they just click it and then they go right into it.
And again, they don't have to login.
It's super easy for them. And so every time I message them
from the item in the platform, they get an e-mail and it makes
it really simple. That's great, Yeah.
Because a lot of that frustration is like, oh, what
was my password? Or, you know, it's like another
place and I can't access it. And so that taking that
frustration out for the client on the client side is huge,
yeah. Super important.
It's built with efficiency. It's built to make you more
profitable. It's built to help you tame the
insanity. But it's really built for your
client to love working with your firm.
Yeah, and none of the others were.
Others say they have a client presentation and you look at it
and it's like a photo on a invoice on a client present.
Well, I'm like, what are you talking about?
You know, and we have our users say they save like 2/3 of their
back office time is saved. And who doesn't want to be able
to be more efficient with your work?
Right. For sure.
Yeah. And now if you're on time
billing and you're like, but now I'm not making as much money,
well, that's just the wrong way to look at it.
Right now you just take your time doing more profitable tasks
like in product and making that 30% markup.
Then you lump laboring over some ridiculous little task.
You can do more projects in the same time.
Yeah, you're definitely going to run a more profitable business.
And at the end of the day, your client would rather spend their
money buying beautiful products products and you make more
money. I mean everyone makes more money
on purchasing than they do on the actual admin of the hours.
And if you're not running your business that way, you're doing
it wrong. So to hate young people.
Don't give away your designer discount.
That's for you, not for them. Add your markup and be strong
about it. You should be cheaper than
retail and that's all they need to know.
Yeah, that's great. OK.
So, so many good things. I think everyone would want to
go and sign up for Style Raw. It's going to make their life so
much easier with managing their projects.
And I know that you also have the client facing side, that you
have some courses that you do as well for helping homeowners to
remodel or get a handle on what they want to do without maybe if
they're doing it on their own, right?
Yeah, absolutely. So under Aaron B Design Studio,
I created a series of DIY courses.
I've actually had a lot of interior designers and and young
designers or people transitioning in their careers
do the courses as well. So I've did a whole series on
kitchen and bathroom modelling and just design and decorating
in general that's available and it's great.
That's great. Yeah, we'll make sure.
There's the knowledge. Yeah, yeah.
I think our listeners would definitely be interested in
maybe checking some of those out too, because they're trying to
get on their feet as a designer and the more you know, it's
better. So exactly, Yep, if you buy one
of the courses or the package, you get access to a portal and
it's all in there. So there's video lessons,
there's some downloads, there's some workbooks.
I take you through a lot of my own projects from start to
finish. The way I work with clients, the
way I handle billing, the way we work with contractors,
specifying materials, our favorite materials.
There's a lot of lot of good stuff in there.
Good, wonderful. OK.
Well, any other advice that you might have for someone starting
out in their career in interior design?
I'd say just do it, have fun. I think one of the major points
that I see with a lot of young people or people starting, I
don't want to keep saying young people because not everybody
gets in this business is young, but think about your social
media presence and what you're putting forward as your work
face, if you will. We didn't have this 20 years
ago. It's so easy to affordably
market yourself these days on Instagram and Facebook and just
make sure that you're really putting forward the vision that
you want people to see of you in a business perspective.
That's one of the biggest kind of gotchas the people start off
with. They're like, well, I don't have
beautiful photos of rooms I've done, sure, but there's lots of
beautiful photos out there that you can share.
And you can of course tag and, and give credit to whomever did
the work. But you can put together your
own aesthetic to represent who you are and what your taste is.
Maybe even just do some tight photographs of your home if
there's some pretty corners or nooks.
Less is more. And rendering these days is
actually quite affordable. You could go and hire a renderer
to render a room that you designed right with those
renderings out there. That's your work.
Just because nobody ever built it doesn't mean it's not your
work. And so there's some really
clever ways, especially with AI in visualization, the costs have
come down of rendering spaces so greatly that I mean, most
magazine ads these days, there was aren't photographs, those
are renders. It's dark carpet.
I mean, all these guys, they're putting their rug in a gorgeous
space that's completely rendered.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
And so I think just to be clever about the way you kind of get
over that hump from zero to 60 where you're like, I don't have
images of my work and less is more.
And I think just really take a keen eye to your presence that
you're putting out there because it might be dogs and kids and
babies and food on your Instagram, but that's the number
one place people are going to go look at you first and see if
your vibe matches their vibe. That's all you have to do is
create the right vibe and people are going to start coming there
and going, oh, that's beautiful. Oh wow, that's great taste.
Most of these influencers that are so popular these days, they
don't do anything except to actually curate.
And you're very similar to that. So think of yourself as an
influencer. You're an interior design
influencer, you're influencing the way people live.
Your taste is why they're hiring you.
And so you just really have to show that you have good taste or
taste that matches your future clients.
Right, right. Yeah.
Well, that's great you. Back it up with the skill.
So then you do the courses and then you get in style row and
then you're all set. There you go and you got a
career. No thanks, Aaron, That's a lot
of great information. We'll put your contact
information in the show notes so people can get in touch with you
and style row and get going on what they need to do.
So thank you for coming on today.
Fantastic. Thanks, Rebecca.
It was a pleasure. All right, so if you'd like to
reach out to Erin and talk to her more about her product or
take some of her courses, you can find her contact information
in the show notes. That is all I have for this
week. Next week we'll have another
great episode. And in the meantime, you can
check the show notes for all the information on my Launch Your
Business Boot camp. You're going to get in right now
because right now we are doing all the pre work.
We're going to get started July the first week and start that
eight week process of getting you from zero to your own
business, from dreaming to designing.
And so if this summer, if that's one of your goals, you can
actually sign up and get in the program right now.
There's some pre work to do. So I'd love to see you in there.
Message me if you have any questions.
I'd love to hear from you. Until next week, stay creative.
Thanks for listening. If you love this episode, please
leave a rating and a review. This helps me reach other
curious creatives like you. If you have a topic request or
would like to contact me, simply head over to my website
ourawarddesign.com or e-mail me at podcast@ourawarddesign.com.