We caught up with the brilliant and insightful The Styled Hause a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
The Styled , appreciate you joining us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
Interior design is a luxury, not a standard! This is a statement we lead with when embarking on consultations with new clientele. The biggest challenge for profitability within the design industry is helping clients understand the difference between a “do it yourself” project, or pinning ideas on your Pinterest board. Most don’t understand the intricacies of undertaking an interior design project so, when presenting the price for our design fee, it can be hard for most clients to grasp. Hiring an interior designer goes far beyond the realm of simply picking furniture, it requires forethought, a deep understanding of interior design styles, designing to scale, creating a space that is not only esthetically pleasing but also functional and cohesive. Understanding what you bring to the table and knowing how to properly convey that to a potential client is key to keeping your design business profitable.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We are The Styled Hause, an interior design firm that specializes in both commercial and residential interior design. We specialize is modern luxury interiors, curated to stand the test of time.
How’d you meet your business partner?
It was during a 8am introduction to interior design course at Towson University, that two local girls from Prince George’s County, MD met and discovered their individual love for all things interior design…Ha! Doesn’t that sound like an organic way that two designers would meet? Well, our story started at Towson University, but the path to get to this point wasn’t as clear. Danielle, a psychology major and Andrea, a business major met and became friends. While we were friends in college, we were both operating our own individual interior design businesses in 2019, when we were presented with an offer to join forces and create the esthetic for a modern/luxurious nail salon in Washington, DC. It was this job that brought us together, and gave us both an appreciation for having another creative to bounce ideas off of, learn from and provide a more fulsome interior design spectrum to tap into. This partnership became solidified after that project, and we’ve been in business for three year now.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media—now that was the organic part! We knew we wanted our audience to take the journey with us from the infancy stages of sharing the idea/concept of creating a business, to the selection of a name, logo, etc. While we are both interior designers, we started our business focused on creating/selling modern luxury custom throw pillows, then slowly merged our interior design services together. When gaining followers, our reach was pretty wide-spread. Andrea, is married and has four daughters. While, Danielle is recently divorced (single) with no children. This dynamic provides our audience with two very distinct, yet much needed perspectives on interior design.
Our advice to those that are just starting is to be authentic and share every part of your journey (good, bad and ugly) with your followers. It helps them get to know you outside of your brand and makes you a “real” person. The objective of social media is not to create a highlight reel but to find your community and the only way to organically do that, is to be yourself and embrace the entire journey. We promise it’ll be worth it!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thestyledhause.com
- Instagram: @Thestyledhause
Image Credits
Belle Imagery