Hello and welcome to episode 158 of Design Curious Podcast.
I'm your host and mentor, Rebecca Ward.
Today on the podcast, we have an interview with Marcy Sagal.
Let me tell you a little bit about her.
Marcy is the founder and principal of MSA Interiors, a
leading commercial interior design firm specializing in
multifamily housing, student housing, senior living,
affordable housing, and other complex commercial projects.
With over 25 years of industry experience, Marcy has
established herself as a trusted expert in creating innovative,
functional, and aesthetically compelling spaces that align
with her client's strategic goals.
Her expertise extends beyond design to include advisory roles
for major manufacturers, helping shape product lines that cater
to evolving market demands. A sought after thought leader,
Marcy shares her insights through speaking engagements and
collaborations, highlighting her ability to bridge creativity
with business acumen. As a creative member of the
Entrepreneurs Organization Baltimore, Marcy embodies
entrepreneurial leadership and innovation.
Her commitment to excellence, coupled with her passion for
design has earned her reputation as a trailblazer in the
commercial interiors industry. I know we don't get a lot of
commercial designers on the podcast, so it was a great
conversation with Marcy, and I think you're going to like it as
well. So let's get into it.
You're now listening to Design Curious, a 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. Hi, Mercy, welcome to Design
Curious Podcast. It's great to have you here
today. Thank you so much, Rebecca.
I'm excited to be here and talk about what I love the most,
design. Me too.
I feel like you have a fresh story that we haven't heard a
lot of lately, so I would love to hear how you got into
interior design, your whole path getting in there.
And I know that you are commercial and multi family
designers, so let's hear about it.
Sure. So I have always had a love of
design since I was a little girl.
My mother would have different designers come and work on her
home and I got very involved in the process at a very young age.
I'm the only daughter and my mother continued to include me
in those processes and I grew a passion from a very young age.
Oh, that's nice of her. And I, of course, went to school
and I studied design and also graphics because I think that
the two are very combined when you're thinking about
holistically a whole space. And I studied both and was
fortunate enough to have the ability to intern for a number
of different companies. From there, I kind of moved
through the process of being a designer and started out doing
residential because I always had a love of residential.
But ultimately I decided that I wanted to be in commercial.
And it's very, very hard for designers to make the transition
from residential to commercial. So that's kind of what I wanted
to talk about a little bit. Let's get into that.
Again, I still love doing residential and still work on
some very large scale projects, but I have found a passion of
doing commercial design that we feel has a much more residential
feel towards it. When we work on the multi family
projects around the country that we work on, we give it that sort
of more residential home feel. So each space at a very high end
apartment building might have those beautiful TV lounges,
great kitchens, fun, different types of amenities and all of
that is the same thing that you see in residential.
It's just been moved to a commercial level on a much
larger scale and we use more commercial finishes, prints in
the fabrics and in the finishes on the walls and just the fire
rated things and different things that we do on a
commercial level. Do you feel limited at all by
commercial materials or is there a lot there now?
Did. When I started originally, they
felt like everything was healthcare and bad vinyls.
And now just about every top fabric company is making
commercially rated fabric. Even look at just the
residential performance fabrics, we didn't have that and you can
use performance fabrics in commercial jobs as long as
they're rated with the right ratings.
We have been incredibly fortunate to be in this time
where we have so many different types of commercial fabrics that
are at our fingertips and commercial wallpaper.
Just about any wallpaper company on the higher level
residentially will also make it for you commercially.
So they'll put it on a vinyl. So if it's on a paper, a lot of
them will still put it on a vinyl and you can use that same
book for a commercial space. So it's, again, finding the
materials that feel right, feel super elegant, feel super high
end. Like when you go into a hotel.
We do hotels as well. When you go into a hotel, it has
that sort of residential flavor to it.
Yeah, people are hanging out in the lobby.
They're enjoying the different spaces throughout the hotel.
Each one has its own flavor, its own sort of audience that it's
trying to attract. And that's pretty much what we
do on a commercial level. OK.
So how long have you been doing commercial projects like these?
I have my own company. Why have we been an incredible
team of people for 21 years? And I'll be doing have been
doing this for over 30 years and just never gets old.
I feel invigorated with it all the time and we try to do the
same thing for our team. New materials make it really
exciting all the time, and new furniture and new fixtures and
all the things that come with it.
Yeah. How did you get your business
started in the 1st place? You.
I'm sure you're working for someone else initially.
I was working for someone else and then I was asked by someone
that I had known for a very long time, since maybe in 9th grade,
who had a very large project and asked if I could work on his
project. And I said well I'm currently
full time working somewhere else.
And he said I am not comfortable with the work that's being done
on my house. And it was a very large house,
very large on the water. And he said I really would like
you to come and work on this, even if you have to do it in the
evenings and weekends because I know you're going to know what I
want. I agreed to do it and it was a
great project. Very first one under my roof was
featured on a top publication cover inside spreads.
Yeah, that was a big deal. And so I thought, OK, well, this
is sort of giving me a message here.
I think I need to have my own company.
And I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so I wasn't
afraid of it. Also very good with numbers and
very good at business development.
And I thought I can do this. So I put a plan together for
myself and I started and I would say definitely through the
school of Hard Knocks, I learned how to run a company.
And obviously I always tell everyone, learn QuickBooks,
learn accounting. You need to know your numbers.
If you have your own firm, you need to know how numbers work.
I didn't know any of that at the beginning.
You know, we have freight cost, we have tariffs, we have
shipping, receiving installation costs.
We have a million different costs that get added on to jobs.
And I don't think a lot of new people understand how that can
increase the cost to the end user significantly.
And so all of those things need to be looked at.
You need to know what those percentages are off the top of
your head and should be able to plug them into a job instantly
as you're putting the numbers together.
Yeah, that's a good point. Because even if you hire a
bookkeeper or an accountant in your business, you still have to
be able to interpret the numbers, understand your
margins. You still are the CEO, and so
you have to make all the hard decisions and make sure your
business is profitable. The other people are there to
keep you on track, but you can't get away from the numbers.
Right. You need to know what your
margins are. You need to know what your
profits are. Your margins are you need to
know where you stand amongst other firms in the country and
what those percentages might look like.
It's really just basically learning how to interpret things
and understand and ask the questions.
And the first thing I would tell people is please get a mentor or
a coach or come to someone that's been in the business for
a really long time like yourself, and let somebody help
guide you through the process. Because had I had a coach or a
mentor back then, I wouldn't have made a lot of listening.
And I'd made and learned and still succeeded, obviously.
But I try to explain that just having another person that can
help guide you through some of the processes of what is
expected and where some of the pitfalls may come and where you
may get yourself into trouble with a contract.
Knowing and figuring out how to review any of those contracts
and making sure that they're ironclad and buttoned up and
that you have everything spelled out for the client.
And this goes for residential or commercial.
Everything is spelled out in scope of services in a contract
and we put pictures in with all of our furniture and all of our
fabrics so that there's no questions that that's what you
picked. We make it really clear and then
we make the client sign off on it.
And we have a whole process that we do internally.
And we have just spent all these years buttoning up all the
processes and making them ironclad.
But when people are starting out, they don't know what a lot
of those pitfalls are and places you can get yourself into
trouble, what you might legally be responsible for, and how to
make those problems be less. And so for me, I finally joined
an entrepreneurial. Group.
After being in business for a long time and it was a turning
point for me, allowed me to have other people that were doing the
same thing. And we all similarly have the
same types of problems. When you're running a business
and you have employees and you have payroll and you have, you
know, you're giving health insurance, we give profit
sharing as well. All of those things that you
have how to document things within your firm and your
employees and basically running a different type of a business
than just being a designer. Being in an entrepreneur group
really helped me to understand, you know, I'm in a forum with
six different people, each one of us in a very different
business, but we all have the same needs and the same
processes. One of the guys in my group, he
has 4000 employees and he is a mission and culture expert.
He is fantastic about growing your culture and growing your
team. I have another person who is
just amazing at developing business.
He's about growing relationships with clients and that's how
we've grown our business. We're very relationship based.
We create these very long term relationships with their clients
so that we can continue to develop more work over the
course of time and other people that work there refer you and
it's just always the constant ongoing growing process.
Yeah. I think that's really critical
is to have peers around you that can elevate your business and
they have to be in the same industry.
That's what I tried to explain to people, yes, it's very
important to have a designer that can mentor you or to have a
coach like yourself to talk to people about what they're doing
wrong and how they can correct it and different paths of going
down, growing your company. But other entrepreneurs, anyone
else that you may know can offer all kinds of added expertise.
I read all the time on books on profitability and books on
growth and team orientation and different things to grow that,
you know, originally we worked in CAD and now my whole entire
company works in Revit. And so everything that we do is
in Revit. And the reason that it changed
from all CAD to all Revit is because we work with very large
architectural firms and they wrote from CAD to Revit.
So we had to go from CAD to Revit.
So I had to invest a lot of money into Revit, into training
for Revit, all of the different years of Revit, because
different architecture firms are working in different years and
you have to work the same year. So we wanted to make sure we
were current with everything, and actually not only current,
but even further ahead. And so everyone that walks in
here has learned Revit, even if they're coming right out of
school and they're going to work in it 100% in our company
because that's typically what we're working in now.
And when you're working in Rabbit, there are other add-ons
that you can work in like Enscape.
And we work in Enscape all the time so that we can render jobs
in house for our clients because it helps the designers to really
see how each element of the design is coming together in one
space. And you can really start to make
some on the spot decisions when you can see that come together.
That's been a very big change in our industry as well.
So you think that if someone who is interested in going
commercial design, they should definitely look at Revit as
their method of? Because it is an ability to see
things in a three-dimensional capacity.
It's very different than CAD, but it has a very superb element
into it that allows you to see it as it's becoming a space.
And so when we take a Revit file from an architecture firm and
then we have to space plan it, we can do amazing things and
give them lots and lots of options on the space planning,
but then we can actually kind of take a few of them and really
see what they're going to look like.
Or then just a flat design. It really does help us to see
the whole space as a three-dimensional space.
And that's been the biggest change commercially.
All firms are using it. All of the bigger firms, anyone
working with larger architectural groups are using
it. It's not to say that we don't
get CAD projects, but we used to have 100% CAD projects and I'd
say we might have one or 2% now, if even that.
And most of those are renovations.
OK. Nothing new in our industry is
being done in CAD anymore. It's being done in Revit.
So I always tell designers, always learn the tools of the
trade or as many different softwares as you can possibly
handle. Rendering softwares are really
important. It's also important to know
Photoshop so that you can work with that when you're doing
inspirations and layout, you can cut and paste things.
It's the way it is for residential and commercial and
we spend a lot of time. Our inspiration and space
planning is pretty spectacular for clients.
I do help mentor a lot of people in learning how they can present
their ideas better to a client and more accurately, so I think
it's really important for people to know how to use some of that.
Software for sure. So you have developed a training
program for Rabbit, right? Yeah, I basically what we're
going to be rolling out, hopefully this will start to
roll out in the next few months. It'll be called Designer Bank.
Basically, it will be learning modules for people to go online
for a very small amount of money and take the beginner,
intermediate, and advanced course for 30 minutes each.
That will allow them to learn tools to utilize as a designer.
It's very simple and Revit's very complex.
No one is ever going to know Revit 100% because there's
different aspects of Revit. So the ultimate tool is to be
able to utilize it as a designer and to utilize it to grow what
you're presenting to either residential or commercial
designer. And so the tools that we're
going to offer are going to be all kinds of different modules.
We're going to start out with rendering.
Those will be the first ones that we roll out.
And then we're going to roll out with just tips and tricks for
the training. So all kinds of tips and tricks.
So we have almost 37 modules that we're going to be rolling
out over the course of the next hopefully six months.
And those modules are all teaching and training tools for
designers. I brought someone in as an
intern, they asked if they could intern here and I'm always kind
of hesitant about interns right out of school because each
school prepares people differently.
Even with the masters, people are not coming out in the world
knowing exactly what they need tool wise.
So I took a look at her portfolio.
I thought it was good. My first question.
And she went to the University of Wisconsin and I said, do you
know Revit? And she said, yes, as a matter
of fact, we learned it in school.
And I said great, because that's what we work in here.
And so she came in and she was very efficient, Efficient enough
in Revit. And then we gave her some other
tools here in our office. We trained so many people in.
Most people have not been able to work on a job from start to
finish, every aspect of a job. And in our company, we'd like
everyone to know every aspect of a job because that's where you
can see what mistakes could be made, what the production looks
like and overseeing the production and that kind of
thing. So basically what we do is we
took her and the first two weeks I said I want you to learn and
skate so that you can hone in on your rendering skills and will
really help you to sort of evolve your projects.
After three months we thought she was so fantastic we offered
her a full time job. She's been great add on to the
team and everyone loves having her here and she's doing a
fantastic job learning about all of the material selections.
And that's another thing, we'll be doing some modules on
material selections, how those change over time and what
materials are good for what and how to select them.
Everything from Schluter and how you utilize Schluter and
different things that are sort of what we called tricks of the
trade. You know, things that you need
to know to be a really good designer so that the finished
space, either residentially or commercially, comes out looking
the way you want it to look and that it feels very fluid and
refined. I have worked with a lot of
manufacturers of the course the last 21 years to help them
create product lines. I worked on some of the original
first LVT vinyl planks or vinyl flooring lines or multifamily
apartments. They wanted to know what colors
work for the apartments in different parts of the country.
And so I work with them to make them much more realistic because
the first ones out looked very plasticky and not real.
And we're like, no, they need to look more like their actual
floor, not just a vinyl plank. They need to look like they're
actually wood flooring. We spent a lot of time with a
lot of different manufacturers working on those lines.
The same with tile. I worked on many different tile
with manufacturers and with distributors to help them create
lines in certain price points for multifamily so that we could
get that high end look for not a lot of money.
And the same thing with plumbing manufacturers.
So worked with probably 3 or 4 different plumbing manufacturers
to create things that were streamlined and more modern and
less chunky and just sort of more simplistic and refined.
Nice. Yeah, wow.
So that's really great because you could definitely steer where
the trends were lacking, you know because we talked about how
originally you getting into the commercial space, there's a more
limited material options. So this entry are definitely had
a hand in developing that further.
I think working with a lot of different residential companies
and watching them roll out their commercial lines and some that
are both because people residentially want much more
sturdier fabrics. They want to know that they're
not going to be able to, you know, stain.
They may want to put a white linen or a beautiful lovely weed
that's lighter in color on their couch or chair and they want to
know that it's not going to stain.
Those were things that people were asking for over and over
again. And so it really was great to
already know what manufacturers were doing those initially and
now we have so many of the resident fabric companies doing
it so. Talking about going from
residential to commercial design, there is a difference I
feel between the clients that you're working, like how you
work with the clients, right? So with single family
residential, you're one-on-one with the homeowners, usually a
couple or something like that, and you're getting into kind of
the psychology of the couple working together and what they
want to see. How does that shift when you get
into multi family, family or commercial spaces?
Great. Question.
So there is a psychology behind it.
We look at it internally as you know you never present anything
you don't like because ultimately it will be selected.
So when we present, we give quite a few options.
I would say a minimum of three in each area, full options,
everything from wall finishes to tile to light fixtures.
We give a lot of options. What we do is we say it's like a
team, just like it would be with a homeowner.
We're working with you to develop your space that you own.
So we're working with developers to develop a space that they own
and they may own it for a very, very long time.
It may be a REIT, it may be a family hold, it may be a
generational development team has had apartments for 50 years
and then they keep building them.
We have lots and lots of clients like that.
So whatever we pick needs to have a long shelf life because
in the multi family world, no one wants to spend the money in
three to five years to change everything that you've just put
in there. Changing fabric and pillows,
that's easy. The accessories, that's easy.
Artwork, that's easy. But when you start to get into
tile and flooring and countertops and cabinetry and
millwork, then it starts to get quite expensive for renovating
and giving it a facelift. And we do facelifts a lot for a
lot of different management companies and a lot of different
development companies. We give them a fresh renovation.
They'll tell us what their budget is and then we will work
within that budget or say this is what we can do in that budget
for this amount of money. And we'll add, we give them up a
number way upfront, including for the furniture and
everything. We give them a number to work
with and then they go and get that from the owner of the
particular building if it's a management company.
And then we know this is how much we have to spend.
And if we go over, then we may have to push it into a phase
two. But it's the same thing
literally as residential. We're presenting it to a team of
people who are going to own it for a very, very long time.
And so we want their buy in. We want them to understand the
whole concept of why we're designing what we're designing,
but we keep them in mind. What I mean by that is the
market audience is the most important thing that we're going
to be looking at. So if we look at a building and
it's got 10 competitors, we would initially on our end as
designers look at all of the competitors, amenities, spaces
and all of their units and we kind of do a comparison.
This one might be super modern, this one might be mid century
modern, this one might be sort of like eclectic.
We'll put pictures together and we'll put a comparison together
in our presentation to show the client because we don't want to
copy what one of your competitors has.
We want to be better than what they have.
So we'll look at is the audience that will be renting in this
space between 30 and 45 or is it going to be between 55 and 70?
Let's say I'm just throwing those ages out based on what
those numbers are. It's we're going to change the
look of what we're doing. That's sort of the most
important thing. But we have to make that
decision as a group. And it's the same thing as with
an individual homeowner or a family.
So, you know, there's probably more people involved like a
board, not. Only do we have the owners in
that meeting. We also have whatever management
group they've hired to lease the property on.
For instance, it could be Greystar, which is a, you know,
one of the largest nationally. They have very distinct list of
what they want in different types of properties.
So we always ask them for that list upfront before we start.
And we've worked with many of the big management companies
around the country and then we work off of what their list is.
So it's a whole team of people and it's pleasing everyone and
it it's definitely different than residential, but the same
outcome. So if you present three options
on everything, how do you get a consensus?
Do you narrow it down to one final like we do?
Project really important. It works really, really well.
So we basically do this giant presentation, do it virtually,
and we basically walk through it with the whole team of people.
What we do initially is we create inspirations for every
area and we do space planning lots and lots and lots of space
options. And so everybody decides what
looks they like and the inspiration as a team, OK,
That's the direction that we end up going in.
And then they pick and choose sometimes combinations of the
space planning that we do. We give little like, you know,
if we did a fireplace, then we put some inspirations into the
fireplace so they can kind of get a direction of where they
want to go. If they're stairs, we might have
some stair railings and types of stairs that we put in the
presentation so they can also pick the look that they want.
It's really interesting as they all come together in a group.
Everyone gets an agreement and you get the buy in, which is
what I love and everybody feels like they participated in
building and and planning the project.
So it is a very exciting concept and the way that we get to it is
by everybody agree and and it's fine and we've gotten the
process down quite good after all of this time.
Yeah, I'm sure you must be good at navigating all those
personalities and getting them to have a consensus.
And, and the whole staff here, everybody on the team is really
fantastic at presenting and really showcasing what they're
trying to sell, which is what we're doing and coming up with
everyone on the same page. Nice.
It's remarkable and it's been a great process to learn and watch
everybody grow in their presenting.
The presentation skills grow over the course of time.
You get very comfortable, start to talk about things very
comfortably and it shows. And so I think when we have
newer people, we might have them present like a small portion and
then the senior person on the team would present the overall
larger scale stuff in space planning.
So it it's fun, it's fun to watch.
Please, how big is your team? How many people?
We have 14 people. We're actually in the process of
hiring between two and three more at the moment and majority
of people are designers. We do have purchasing full time
and then we're hiring another purchasing.
We don't really have project managers.
Mary Beth and I tend to do that, but we are going to be looking
at hiring and training some project managers going forward.
We have lots of senior designers, mid level designers
and then of course junior designers.
And is multifamily affected like single family is for the economy
and like trying up and down and all that stuff too, so?
During O 811, I was in one segment of multifamily as a
business owner, and it literally crushed me.
I was fortunate and I swore that I would have five more revenue
streams so that no other economy crush would harm us.
We went way beyond 5. So we do senior living, we do
hospitals, we do stadiums, we do student housing, we do
affordable housing. And we grew every single one of
these arms of our business so that we would not be affected in
a dramatic way if the economy and the interest rates and
everything else were sort of going crazy, which we just
experienced and are still experiencing with furniture and
tariffs and that kind of thing. OK, that was smart.
But that's a lot also to have your team be like, do you have
people who have specialized in like 1 in senior living?
And yeah, OK, because that's a lot to know.
And hospitals, healthcare, those are very specific industries.
So I do have people that just do that and then everyone else
pretty much focuses on all of the other projects.
OK. Yeah, very smart.
OK, great. Well, gosh, this has been so
good and I know people are going to want to reach out to find
those trainings. Where can they find you?
We're at msainteriors.com and we will on our website be letting
everyone know when we're launching Designer Bank and it's
going to get a big social media launch as soon as we get them
completed. We're going to go ahead and get
the first ones out and let different people try it.
And if you are a designer that wants to try beta testing and
working on some of our modules, just feel free to shoot me an
e-mail and I'm happy to do that. Still, we'll let you try it and
see what your thoughts are and get some feedback from you.
Great. Thanks, Marcie.
Thank you. Wonderful to talk to you.
Let's stay in touch. I would love that.
Thank you again, I appreciate it.
So go ahead and check out Marcy's information in the show
notes if you'd like to contact her about anything that she said
today. I thought it was just a great
conversation. And also, while you're in the
show notes, check out the other links that we have for you.
There's so many great things, downloads and information about
my design mentor, which is my online mentorship platform.
So go check that out next week, we'll have another great episode
for you. And until then, 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
rawarddesign.com or e-mail me at podcast@rawarddesign.com.