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 Supp...

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,...

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...

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 design to dog photography to interiors, which she has shot since 2013. She sees photography as an opaque trade in the...

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,...

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 las...

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. Separate...

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...

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 corpora...

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 fol...

Susan Jamieson founded Bridget Berry Designs, a Richmond, Virginia-based design firm named after her rescue dogs rather than herself, a branding choice she made so the business could grow and change hands independent of her own name. Over 35 years, she's built the firm into a home store, a paint line, a wallpaper line, and most recently a self-published book. Susan's move into design happened by c...

Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson talk with Tara Kelley, founder of TJK Bookkeeping and a longtime friend of Laurie's, about one of the biggest struggles in the design industry: financial clarity. Tara built her career in corporate finance before starting her own firm, where she now works with several interior design clients. The conversation covers why most designers never feel like they have a fir...

Laurie Laizure talks with Morgan Finley of Morgan and Hatch Design about the reel series that put Morgan on Laurie's radar, "Who's Gonna Clean That," and what it revealed about why designers should show more of the real, unfiltered version of their work. Morgan explains how a single viral video, a fluted marble hood nobody wants to clean, drove roughly 3,000 new followers and kept compounding as s...

Chris Laumer-Giddens joins Laurie Laizure to talk about building science, the study of why homes fail and how to build them so they last for generations instead of twenty years. Chris works with his wife, Jody, who has owned LG Squared since 2006; he joined in 2012 after specializing in indoor air quality, rot, mold, and thermal failures. LG Squared handles architecture, interiors, and mechanical,...

Jameelah Watkins-Mallett, founder of Lauren Wesley Designs and creator of the CASE Collective conference , talks with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson about trust between designers, real talk about money, and the path that took her from doing hair at twelve years old to running a thriving design and events business. The conversation opens with a candid look at why designers hide their best work onl...

Sharon Sherman of Thyme and Place Design has 40-plus years of experience across interior design and kitchen and bath, and that dual perspective gives her an unusually clear view of what's broken among designers, showrooms, and brands, and what actually works. The episode digs into a gap that's been widening since COVID. Clients are changing. Showrooms are closing. Brands that want the designer mar...

Jenny York, VP of Marketing at Currey & Company, joins Laurie for a conversation about what it actually takes to build a brand that designers want to work with. Currey is approaching its 40th anniversary as a second-generation family-owned business, now led by founder Robert and Suzy Currey's son Brownlee. That independence shapes everything, including creative risk-taking, the decision to hol...

Kimberly Kerl is an architect and designer based in South Carolina with thirty years of experience, and her episode with Laurie and Nile covers a lot of ground: client process, billing, trends, and an honest read on where the market is right now.   She starts with video. Kimberly has been documenting a live renovation at her own home, posting unscripted walk-throughs from the job site multiple tim...

Tracee Murphy has spent 26 years in luxury residential design, runs her firm Trademark Interiors, and teaches designers and brands how to leverage psychology for a competitive edge through her platform, The Designer Launch. Her title, The Design Biz Therapist, is not a metaphor. She believes the gap between a struggling design business and a thriving one often has nothing to do with talent, portfo...

Eric Dillman started in interior design school, moved into sales and digital marketing, and now works directly with designers to help them show up consistently on social media and stop waiting for the perfect moment to post. In this conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson, he gets into what designers should prioritize, how to stay consistent when life gets hard, and how to finally get on...

Rhobin DelaCruz has been designing for over 18 years, but he didn't attend High Point Market until about 2.5 years ago. The turning point was business coaching, specifically understanding that designers who build direct vendor relationships and sell to their clients themselves can capture 20 to 100 percent profit on goods, compared to the 10 to 20 percent that comes from sending someone to a retai...

Houston designer Juliana Ewer has been going to High Point Market almost every year since 2018. In this episode of To-The-Trade, she and host Laurie Laizure make the practical, financial, and professional case for why market attendance matters not as a perk, but as a real competitive edge. The conversation starts where Juliana always starts: product knowledge. You can't do a sit test online. When...

Jill Erwin started her interior design business in 2006, survived the recession, and recently hit the 20-year mark with a rebrand: Just Jill Home. She joined Laurie and Nile on To-The-Trade to discuss what it actually takes to get to the point where you charge what you are worth and stay there. Pricing was the throughline. Jill has spent years attending industry panels where designers reference ra...

Maria Khouri grew up in Beirut during Lebanon's 15-year civil war, moving 12 times in 10 years. She has spent her career making homes in San Francisco that feel like exactly that: home. Her boutique firm handles high-end residential work across the US and into Europe, and her commercial clients hire her for the same reason her residential clients do. They want spaces that feel personal. In this ep...

Kelly Collier-Clark of House of Clark Interiors came to interior design after nearly 20 years in corporate America, a real estate license, and a full life lived before she ever took her first design client. When House Beautiful named her a Next Wave Designer, she found out at a restaurant and cried in the bathroom. It was earned. In this conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson, Kelly get...