To-The-Trade with Interior Design Community

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 gets into the real work behind confidence, the business logic behind marketing strategy, and why pricing clarity is a professional responsibility, not just a personal choice.
On confidence: Kelly is direct. She did the work. Temple University's design program. Paid mentorship. Years of corporate experience in rooms where she was often the only woman and the only Black woman. The confidence she brought to design didn't come out of nowhere. And her message to newer designers is consistent: faith without works is dead. Show up, do the work, and the confidence follows.
On strategy: Laurie opens with a marketing story about a small bikini brand that infiltrated a celebrity's inner circle before going directly to the celebrity. Kelly connects it to the sphere-of-influence principles from her real estate training. Know your ideal client. Know where they spend time. Be in those rooms. She's moved intentionally to LinkedIn because that's where her former corporate colleagues, the professionals with real budgets, are spending time.
On showing up as yourself: Kelly's best content advice is also her clearest. Clients are doing research before they ever reach out. They're watching your stories. She's had new clients mention her honeymoon location in the first consultation. That level of trust doesn't come from AI-generated captions. It comes from consistently showing up and being authentic over time.
On pricing: No designer should charge less than $100/hour. Kelly takes it further: lowballing doesn't just hurt the individual designer. It sets a market standard that affects everyone. New designers especially need to hear this. Running a project doesn't get easier just because you're newer. If anything, it's harder. Charge accordingly.
The conversation also covers the "free design" offered by big-box retailers, why it's furniture sales, not design, and how smart designers can use quality comparisons as direct content to attract the right clients.
Find Kelly at House of Clark Interiors and on Instagram @kellycollierclark.

Laura Hildebrandt of Interiors by LH joins Laurie Laizure to share how she built a thriving interior design business in the DC area after a divorce left her a single mom of three with no work history or industry background. Starting with home staging in 2013 using furniture from her own house, Laura taught herself design at night, funded her early business on credit cards, and gradually transitioned into full-service interior design.
The conversation covers Laura's pricing journey from $75/hour to her current rate of $250, with plans to raise it again. Laurie reinforces that no designer should be under $100 an hour and shares a cautionary story about a builder who tried to pay a designer less than minimum wage for full design services on $5 million homes.
Laura walks through her client process: a free 15-minute phone call, a $600 two-hour in-home consultation, and an in-person contract review. She reports a 95% close rate and typically walks out with a signed contract and retainer the same day. Her 15-page contract covers everything from communication expectations to liability protections.
Boundaries are a major theme. Laura does not text clients, keeps firm phone hours (9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.), and gives herself 48 hours to respond to email, all of which are written into her contract. Both Laura and Laurie discuss how women in the industry are often pressured to undervalue their work, whether through lowball builder offers, "carrot opportunities" that never materialize, or clients who try to deduct losses from design fees.
Laura warns designers never to run subcontractors through their business without a GC license and stresses the importance of collecting fees before final installation. The episode closes with a strong message about work-life balance: exhausting yourself does not produce better work, clients will not remember your sacrifices, and the beauty of owning your business is getting to decide how you live your life.

Ann Feldstein, founder of Moxie Marketing and a 25-year veteran of the interior design industry, joins Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson to discuss why women supporting women is one of the most practical business strategies designers can adopt.
Ann's research-backed work on internalized misogyny explores how women unknowingly project societal biases onto each other, from judgment about appearance and life choices to reluctance to share pricing, proposals, and resources with competitors. She traces these patterns to early messaging, fairy tales built on female rivalry, impossible body standards, and a culture that penalizes women for being too direct or too confident.
Laurie shares the example of Shelly Hudson's text group of 15 direct competitors who share everything from pricing to wallpaper installers. The result: stronger systems, higher prices, and better businesses across the board. The takeaway is that transparency between competitors is not a threat. It is a growth strategy.
Ann draws on her experience as a CrossFit coach to illustrate the confidence gap. She consistently told women to add more weight to the bar because they underestimated themselves. Men almost always had to be told to take weight off. That same dynamic plays out in how designers price, present, and advocate for themselves.
Nile adds that everything he learned about business came from women and urges the industry to acknowledge and honor what women bring to the trade. The conversation also examines how men can be better advocates, the AD100 gender imbalance, the "manel" phenomenon, the mental load women carry, and what happens when husbands join successful design businesses and try to restructure what was already working.
Laurie announces plans to write personal recognition letters to 10 designers a month and highlights IDC's 15% profit challenge as a way for designers to strengthen their businesses together. Ann closes with a clear message: every opportunity to elevate another woman in the trade benefits the entire industry.

This episode of To-The-Trade is brought to you by AJ Madison Pro, the industry's trusted appliance resource for interior design professionals. Recorded live on the floor of KBIS 2026, this special episode of To-The-Trade brings together high-end designer Nikki Levy and Jenny York, VP of Marketing for Currey & Company, for a candid conversation about what it actually takes to build lasting designer-brand relationships.
Nikki runs a South Florida firm with 12 employees, 30 active projects, and $50 million in annual specifying dollars. She is direct about what she expects from brands: live people who answer phones, clean returns, MAP pricing that is actually enforced, and reps who function as educators rather than catalog-delivery services. Jenny explains how Currey & Company has built its designer-first reputation over 37 years, including 48-hour shipping, no minimums, no credit card surcharges, and freight calculators available before checkout.
The conversation covers bad rep stories that cost brands six figures in lost business, what designers can do to build goodwill with brands they love, freight billing fragmentation and how to protect yourself, brand storytelling as a client sales tool, and why lighting should never be specced last. For designers looking to strengthen their vendor relationships, and for brands trying to understand what designers actually need, this is a rare conversation where both sides are in the same room and being honest.

PJ Delaye spent 26 years at York Wall Coverings, rising from export director to president of North America's largest wallpaper manufacturer. In this episode of To-The-Trade, he joins Laurie to discuss the wall covering industry's dramatic comeback and why designers should pay close attention.
PJ compares today's wall covering landscape to the craft beer revolution. Digital printing has lowered the barrier to entry, and smaller studios are creating bold, personality-driven patterns that major manufacturers might never have attempted. Coupled with a cultural shift away from minimalism toward maximalist, character-rich interiors, wallpaper is firmly back in the mainstream.
For designers, PJ makes a clear business case. Wall coverings typically offer a 20 to 40 percent designer discount, providing significantly higher margins than paint. They also serve as portfolio builders and referral generators, because a striking wallpaper pattern prompts the "who's your designer" question in a way paint simply can't.
The conversation also covers practical aspects. PJ explains why non-woven backing has become the industry standard for quality wallpaper. Non-woven products are dimensionally stable, allow paste-the-wall installation, enable precise seam matching, and can be removed in full strips. He and Laurie contrast this with peel-and-stick, which helped reintroduce consumers to wallpaper but requires overlapping seams and can split as vinyl shifts with temperature changes.
PJ also introduces his new company, Veer Decor, which curates wallpaper from multiple European mills and studios to offer designers a broad, exclusive portfolio. Laurie concludes with ThinkLab data, estimating the North American wall covering market at nearly $12 billion annually, reinforcing that this is a category designers should not overlook.