To-The-Trade with Interior Design Community

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, portfolio, or pricing and everything to do with emotional intelligence.
The conversation starts where Tracee says every project should start: with the designer. Before reading a client, you have to be able to read yourself. That means knowing your triggers, recognizing when your emotions are shaping your decisions, and building the self-awareness to pause before you react. No system, no contract, and no questionnaire does its job without it.
On the client side, Tracee has developed a lifestyle questionnaire that serves a dual purpose. On the surface, it collects project information. Underneath, the answers reveal how a client makes decisions, how much control they want, how they handle problems, and what they need to feel confident in a process they do not fully understand. Tracee feeds those answers into AI to build a psychological profile, then uses that profile to calibrate how her team communicates, not to reinvent her process, but to tailor her language. A control-oriented client might get more specific updates. A hands-off client gets the same template with less added. The process stays the same. The communication flexes.
That consistency matters because trust is not built in a first meeting. It is built through leadership. Tracee talks about what happens when a designer lets a client take the wheel, from choosing tiles together in a showroom to absorbing last-minute changes from an absent partner who never signed off on anything. In her firm, all decision makers are required to attend every meeting. If someone new comes in six months later wanting to change direction, the conversation is clear: here is what that costs, here is how it changes the timeline, and it is your call.
The business results are real. Over five years of intentionally implementing emotional intelligence practices, Tracee's firm's profits doubled. She also had a heart attack at 48 during a client presentation. The two facts are connected. The boundary work is not just about money. It is about staying in this industry long enough to do great work.
The Designer Launch offers courses on the psychology of interior design, conflict management, and selling luxury. Follow Tracee at @thedesignbiztherapist on Instagram and visit thedesignerlaunch.com to learn more.

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 camera.
On platforms, Instagram remains the primary play for most designers. It's visual, it's where clients are, and Meta rewards native posting. LinkedIn is useful for brand and manufacturer relationships, not client leads. YouTube Shorts is quietly building, and Laurie notes that YouTube feeds AI search in ways worth paying attention to. The simplest strategy is to find one platform where you can perform well and automate distribution to the rest.
On content: designers are sitting in a content goldmine and don't know it. The mistake is thinking in terms of final outcomes— the reveal, the finished room. Clients want the process. They want to know who's in their house, why you made the choices you made, and what goes into a recommendation they might have taken for granted. Tag your brands. Document your decisions. That context is something no influencer can fake, because they weren't on the job.
On consistency: batch your content. Eric records podcast episodes months ahead and coaches designers to keep a running camera roll of unposted content so that when a hard week hits, the feed keeps going. Laurie adds that reposting something from six months ago is completely fair—most people won't remember, and the ones who do will just say it was a good one.
On-camera fear: Nile admits he has the ring light and the mic and still doesn't use them. Eric didn't show his face on his own profile for two years. His starting point: a tight one-minute script, built with AI, run through a panel of AI critics to strengthen it before you record. Use Instagram's free Edits app for teleprompter, green screen, and clip-by-clip recording. Flub a sentence, delete that clip, move on. Post it, then put your phone down. Your biggest supporters will be strangers who connect with your work -- not your inner circle.
The episode closes with an idea Laurie and Eric are both clearly excited about: a challenge to get 10,000 interior designers making videos, using shared scripts and a common hashtag.

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 retailer. That math made the trip worth taking.
In this episode of To-The-Trade, Rhobin talks with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson about how his approach to the market has evolved with each visit. His first was about observation. His second was intentional: meet the right people, make a lasting impression, and leave market with contacts who would remember his name. That shift in strategy set off a chain of relationships that has shaped his business in ways he didn't see coming.
This spring, Rhobin is a High Point Market Style Spotter. He's leading a Saturday tour focused on just two showrooms, Classic Home and Sunpan, and plans to highlight the campus's outer areas that most attendees skip. His practical navigation advice: download the app, group your visits by building, and wear broken-in shoes. Fashion is a real thing at High Point, but the market day calls for comfort first.
Some of his best advice is the bigger picture: go in with a strategy, but stay open to who you meet. That's how the Design Besties came together. Rhobin met Whitney Atkinson, Laurie Johnson, and Nikki Watson at the VRD Summit, and the four bonded on a group showroom tour at his second market. He started a group text after the trip. Two years later, they're in daily contact and serve as each other's informal board of advisors.
From that group came the Teachers Lounge Movement, now a 501C3 nonprofit. When Nikki suggested designing a teacher's lounge for a local school instead of her own backyard, the group immediately said yes. The emotional reveal from that first project changed the trajectory of all four designers' work. Their High Point collaboration with High Point by Design brought in over 20 brands and more than $50,000 in donated furniture.
The episode also covers how visibility in this industry is actually earned, why follow-up is the skill most designers undervalue, and why the path to becoming a Style Spotter or panel guest has nothing to do with paying to play.
Rhobin's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rhobindelacruzdesigns/
Website: https://rhobindelacruz.com/

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 a client says they want a firmer seat or a fabric that holds up to daily family life, the designer who has been in the showroom and sat in the chair already knows what to recommend. Laurie adds that the market also helps you spot saturation. She walks through the boucle moment, when every showroom in the same year had the same off-white fabric, and experienced designers immediately clocked that it was already over. You only see that pattern from a bird's eye view.
The quality difference between trade-only and retail brands is clear. If the general public knows a store by name, the company has spent a lot of money on marketing rather than on materials. The brands at High Point that don't run national campaigns typically reinvest that budget into the product. Juliana illustrates this with a vendor who, months after delivery, identified a frame issue from a single photograph and coordinated a full pickup and rework around her client's schedule, including a family wedding. That level of service is what protects a designer's reputation when something goes wrong.
Practical market tips run throughout the episode: comfortable shoes, leave the laptop at home, let vendors mail the catalogs, and plan your showroom route around the education sessions. The 313 Space gets a recommendation for its natural light and boutique vendors. The Antique and Design Center at Market Square opens a day early on Thursday, and things move fast. Hooker's outdoor deck is the reset button when the day gets overwhelming.
Juliana leads Insider Tours for High Point Market Authority and is leading a Hotspot Tour this year as part of the StyleSpotter program. She came to market for the first time as a new designer in 2018, went to every education session she could find, and met a stranger on the shuttle who became a lasting friend. The market is where relationships are built with vendors and other designers, and sometimes with the version of your business you didn't know you were building.

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 rates without ever naming a number. Her take: just say it. Based on the market data Laurie shared, designers at the 20-year mark are operating in the $250 to $300 per hour range, with major metro markets pushing considerably higher. Jill confirmed she is moving toward $250 in Richmond and is clear-eyed about why: that is what her experience is worth.

To give clients a lower-risk entry point, Jill developed two introductory service tiers she calls Quick and Fast (2.5 hours) and Short and Sweet (5 hours). Both were designed to let her assess a client's and a project's fit before moving into a full contract. If the dynamic feels off, she has a structured way out. If it feels right, she moves forward. The contract itself has evolved over 20 years, adding photography rights, scope protections, and other clauses she learned to include the hard way.

Design philosophy came through in the specifics. She described a multigenerational family room near the Chesapeake Bay where she fit seven individual seats, a sofa, and a round leather ottoman into a cohesive plan, each piece chosen for how a specific family member actually uses the room. She also talked through a repeat client who came back after 15 years as an empty nester. Jill designed a custom coffee station with navy cabinetry and a bistro table, built around how the client now starts her mornings.

The broader conversation circled back to the same point Jill has spent 20 years learning: designers who undercharge are not just hurting themselves. They are giving away equity that belongs in their own businesses and households. The client benefits. The designer absorbs the cost.

Jill's new website, Just Jill Home, launches May 1, 2026. She can be found on Instagram at [@justjillhome](https://www.instagram.com/justjillhome/).