We recently connected with Marissa Pope, Laura Dickson NA and have shared our conversation below.

Marissa Pope, Laura Dickson, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think it takes to be successful?

Laura and I feel there are several aspects to becoming successful in the interior design industry. There are many wonderful examples to learn from. We have been fortunate to have had some opportunities to learn from our failures and challenges. We feel that it is important to see these challenges from different perspectives in order to successfully and creatively solve whatever is before us. We feel that discipline is essential over motivation. Motivation comes and goes, but discipline is a choice. It’s important to make the choice to work hard, have confidence in our abilities and ourselves, create clear and unified visions with our clients and focus on the positives.
Having a healthy balance with our personal lives is also a huge part of success. The reason we do what we do is to improve the lives of our clients so they have spaces to be productive and enjoy their lives. Taking time to enjoy life is very important.
Lastly, we feel like having great snacks and staying hydrated is definitely an element to success throughout the workday for sure.

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.

Hello! I’m Marissa Pope. As far as my background goes, I have loved interior spaces and beautiful things as long as I can remember. I remember spaces that I felt comfortable in and as I learned more about art and design I could analyze why I might have felt how I did. After graduating from Brigham Young University and being a newlywed I was free to create my own spaces and try new things. I learned to upholster furniture and sew things for my home. I was fortunate to help others with their spaces, furniture and homes as well. After supporting my husband while he started his own businesses and raising our 5 children, it was time for me to start sharing my talents on a more structured level by starting Marissa Pope Interior Design as a legit business. I designed our home and had wonderful contractors that were able to help the vision come to life. We entered the home in the Parade of Homes where we won the People’s Choice award.

Hi! I’m Laura Dickson. My creativity towards being an interior designer started all the way back as a young kid filling my sketch book with floor plans. I started by drawing my house out room by room and then I added different dream homes with all the cool furniture and toys I wish I had. There is no way those floor plans were to scale and I had no idea what I was doing, but that is where my dream of being a designer began. Later, my family got the SIMS computer game and I would spend (way too many) hours building and furnishing homes. And finally when I was in high school, a group was talking about careers and what we wanted to do. My friend mentioned being an interior designer which I had never heard of before, but it didn’t take much research to realize that it was perfect goal for myself.
I attended BYU-Idaho and received my BA in Interior Design in 2011. After graduating, I supported my husband’s military career and put everything on hold. I focused on raising our daughter and exploring art- things I could do at home and easily take with us wherever we moved. In 2020, my husband finished his final contract with the Army and we moved to Utah to be closer to family. Marissa, my sister-in-law, had just started her business and so I jumped at the opportunity to work with her and create an amazing business doing what I had always wanted.

The important thing to know about our business is that we design with people in mind. We love connecting with our clients and creating relationships that enable us to design homes that are comfortable, functional, and of course beautiful. Being in an environment that we love helps us to feel better about ourselves, be more creative, be more efficient in our daily tasks, and to be more grateful for the simple things.
We are most proud of our relationships with our clients and helping them with the creation of the vision for how they want to live and feel. We focus on getting to know our clients on a level that helps us create vision boards that they love. We understand what they love, what they don’t, what functions they perform and how.
The main things we are proud of are our organization, skill, creativity and discipline. We would want our potential clients to know is we are always researching, expanding our education and creating which can benefit their projects immensely. We want them to be proud of their space. We work to incorporate all aspects of living and productivity to make it a home. We create spaces that are timeless and adaptable to future trends.
Our combined experience and education has been a wonderful adventure and experience for us. We love working together and enjoy the process of creating and bringing spaces to life.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

In our journey as creative designers we have encountered a few different attitudes toward our profession. We sometimes run into people who don’t value what services we have to offer from start to finish of a building project. We speak the language of the contractors and trades people so it is easier for us to convey our clients wants and needs effectively. We find those that want to do it themselves. We have come in halfway for a lot of these clients fixing whatever parts of the process they failed to understand or things that were lost in translation with the builder. We respect the tradesmen that we have worked closely with and are amazed at the talent they have. A fun part of our creative journey is that it is just that…a journey. We are constantly taking in our surroundings. The way our minds work is we see things in different ways and different applications, and we find new ways to create beauty. I’ll bet if you let a designer sit in a room for 20 minutes they have re-arranged, re-designed and re-imagined new finishes for the entire space whether it needed it or not.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

In our creative journey to help others express themselves and create beautiful and productive spaces, we hope to enhance the lives of all those that live there or are visitors for a time. We hope to provide spaces that create experiences that involve our senses and evoke emotion. We see it as living art that is evolving and always changing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marissapopedesign.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/marissapopedesign
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marissapopedesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissa-pope-interior-design-281110280/

Image Credits
Rebecca Westover photography