To-The-Trade with Interior Design Community

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, then learned their business insurance included errors and omissions coverage all along.
Laurie recommends a year-end expense audit. She cut a $600-a-year AI slide tool once other software could do the job. She also shares a template hack: screenshot a design you like on Pinterest, hand it to Claude or ChatGPT with your content and brand colors, and describe what you like about it.
One of the strongest ideas: turn your investment guide into an ROI story. Show what rooms cost and what past projects returned. Laurie suggests sending new clients home inspector videos that expose builder-grade mistakes, so they see how a designer's space planning and surface selections protect their investment.
Then the conversation turns to showrooms, brands, and reps. Most trade education is loosely tied to a product or stuck in theory. Designers want three actionable takeaways, real talk about profit leaks, J. Peterman-style storytelling about products, and regional sales data that shows what's working. Laurie's "babysitter test" frames it: designers give up family time, parking fees, and billable hours to attend an evening event, and the audience is owed a debt the moment they sit down. Both agree education outsells a sales pitch over time.
Laurie challenges the "I didn't pay myself for two years" story that gets applause on stage. If you skipped a salary, explain how. Most designers can't, and many work second jobs to keep their firms going. Her advice to designers in their 20s: start a 401(k). On show houses, including Kips Bay, they agree: never take out a loan for marketing, know your goal, and run the numbers first. Nile's tip for new firms: hire the accountant first.
They close with practical AI: building an event portfolio from years of emails, finding lost messages, tracking magazine editors to build relationships, and using Meta's Muse to monitor design conversations.

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 spread-out, car-driven market made that a challenge, so West Edge leans into experience: an airplane hangar at the Santa Monica Barker Hangar with the doors open, familiar trade brands, and undiscovered makers creating bespoke, collectible pieces.
The fair is about 70% design trade, with a consumer audience that West Edge sees as part of the process. After the 2025 wildfires, it partnered with Team Palisades to host a Rebuild Connect Lounge that drew about 500 homeowners. Builders, architects, and landscape architects are attending in growing numbers, too.
Laurie urges designers to stop shopping smaller shows and start building relationships there, since brand owners and senior leadership are actually accessible. Megan adds that designers should do their homework and reach out to exhibitors ahead of time. West Edge supports that with a trade preview tour, pre-show education and boot camps, and a Friday "Meet Your Mentor" event with three newer industry groups.
The hosts also take on brand follow-up. Generic "great seeing you at market" emails are not working. Laurie suggests personal DMs and real engagement when designers tag a brand on social, noting that a designer's post can outperform a local magazine placement. Megan points to West Edge's cloud-based lead scanning, which lets exhibitors follow up the same day.
Megan introduces Rising Design, a new competition and 10-episode series featuring six designers with fewer than five years of practice, each building a 10x10 vignette with shop-the-look QR codes. She also speaks candidly about production pressure, including two Canadian exhibitors who withdrew because of tariffs.
 West Edge runs October 29 to 31. Trade pros and design students get complimentary Friday and Saturday access when they register by October 23.

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 same way design is: people work alone
and learn by trial and error. The most common friction point is cost.
Because everyone has a camera in their pocket, professional rates surprise
people, and her advice is to bake photography into the project cost from
the beginning rather than scrambling for the money at the end. When Nile
asks about contacting a photographer at project kickoff to get a number for
the proposal, she says yes, with a buffer for rate increases over a long
build.
On permissions, Regan urges designers to put photography in the agreement
and to raise it with homeowners early, so a no does not arrive eighteen
months in. Nile describes handling it as a matter-of-fact step repeated
across the investment guide, welcome guide, and a separate permissions
sheet. On rights, Regan explains that a photographer can legally license an
image commercially, but a property release from the homeowner is required,
and retouching a designer's specified products out of a shot is bad form.
For designers chasing press, she offers a reality check. Magazines are
flooded with submissions, and who took the photos may get an email opened
faster but will not change the answer. Editors decide on the project, the
homeowner, the designer, the art, and the styling, and the most common
rejection notes are that a space does not feel lived in or needs better
art. She points designers toward regional and niche titles where serious
local homeowners are already looking.
The practical half covers DIY shots for designers who cannot hire yet
(natural light only, lights off, tight details and vignettes, skip the wide
shots), pre-production, shot list discipline at fifteen to twenty shots a
day, shooting opposite the light with a compass and an assistant, mixing in
verticals for social and editorial, and bringing five times more florals
than expected. She also shares her shared-shoot rules after one painful day
with an architect and designer both on set, and makes the case that
storytelling, not documentation, is what actually wins designers more work.

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, a course platform launching with 13 courses (35 within its first year and a half), after noticing that most design school graduates arrive without Revit training her large architectural partners already require. The courses run from Revit fundamentals through Enscape rendering, because visualization, she says, is what actually gets clients emotionally attached enough to say yes.
That same instinct for closing a gap shows up in her approach to commercial interiors. Rather than default to sterile, repetitive commercial finishes, she carves out lounges, cafes, and gaming areas that feel residential, an approach Laurie dubs "resommercial." The goal is not more spending. It is making sure people feel proud of the building regardless of price point.
On budgeting, Sagel pushes back hard on the idea that asking a client's budget upfront is manipulative. A budget range, she argues, is simply where two sides start communicating what they actually want, and it is not optional on large commercial jobs, where clients are funded years in advance with no room to ask for more later.
She is equally direct about specifying versus purchasing: her firm specifies more than ten million dollars a year in materials her clients never realize she is choosing, from decorative lighting to paint to flooring underlayment. Her signature story: scratching a client's wood floor sample with his own key to prove it was the wrong choice for a high-traffic event space, then sourcing a commercially rated floor for less money than he was already planning to spend.
On running the business, Sagel credits delegating to a VP of Operations she trained by bringing her to every client meeting, and credits her entrepreneurs' organization membership for the accountability a CEO does not otherwise get.
The episode closes on two points IDC's audience will recognize. Asked if new designers should market themselves before they have projects, Sagel's answer is yes: market who you are as a person. And Laurie names something rampant in the industry, imposter syndrome, pointing out that no contractor waits to get published in a magazine before calling himself a contractor.

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 last: merged furniture buying power and joint accounts from the start, separate billing for hours worked in the early years, and a operating agreement they revisit regularly as their roles shift.
A year ago they brought on a business coach who typically works with CEOs, meeting weekly for three hours. He's helped them build an organizational chart and forced overdue conversations about financials and communication. Christensen says the biggest surprise wasn't the partnership itself but how much back-end work employees created.
The conversation gets specific on pricing. The firm bills hourly for design work until plans go to engineering, then flat fee once square footage is set, reverting to hourly past 18 months. Christensen spends about ninety minutes consulting clients and calls their builder directly to clarify documentation expectations before quoting. Furniture requires full payment before ordering and a second retainer before staging, so clients rarely face a surprise bill at project close.
Consistent builder relationships are, in her words, key to staffing and profitability, since repeat work with the same builders cuts the learning curve on subcontractors and allowances. She also shares that furniture and design fees carry comparable profit margins percentage-wise, though furniture produces higher total dollars, and margins vary by builder based on how much oversight a project requires.
This year the firm opted out of Parade of Homes for the first time in ten years, taking a deliberate break after years of tight, high-pressure timelines, even though the parade has historically driven strong long-term referrals. Looking forward, Christensen and Nikki are pursuing product licensing, and Yvonne recently joined the Moen Design Council through an organic industry connection. The episode wraps with a few personal notes: her favorite spaces to design are libraries and additional sitting rooms, her belief that a house should always feel personal, and a favorite project on a ranch property in Kanab, Utah, where a client's handful of found rocks set the entire material palette.