To-The-Trade with Interior Design Community

Susan Jamieson founded Bridget Berry Designs, a Richmond, Virginia-based design firm named after her rescue dogs rather than herself, a branding choice she made so the business could grow and change hands independent of her own name. Over 35 years, she's built the firm into a home store, a paint line, a wallpaper line, and most recently a self-published book.
Susan's move into design happened by chance. She started college aiming to become a stockbroker, then fell in love with the field while sitting in on her mother's renovation meetings with an architect and designer. She switched paths and never looked back.
The paint and wallpaper lines both grew out of the same problem: she could never find the exact color or pattern she needed, so she started making her own. She encourages designers to support smaller, designer-led product lines because they offer flexibility larger brands can't, including custom colors and scaling.
Her new book, Bridget Berry Color Rules, expanded from a blog into 70 rules on color theory, inspiration, and practical application, aimed at homeowners but also useful as a refresher for designers. She self-published to control pricing and margin, printing through a manufacturer in China.
Susan and Laurie talk through AI's limits in design work, agreeing that AI struggles with scale and can't replace the judgment and delivery work designers provide. Susan walks through her client process, including a New York condo project for repeat clients whose usual traditional style doesn't match their new space.
Asked about her biggest business mistake, Susan points to overstaffing early in her career and the payroll and tax burden that came with it. She's since scaled her design team down to three people. Her pricing has evolved from purely hourly to a mix of hourly site visit billing and flat project fees with built-in time limits, since client indecision, not design work, tends to drive delays.
The episode wraps with a quick round on Susan's personal preferences and a look at what's next, including a new fabric line and a booth at High Point featuring the book, wallpaper, and new lampshade designs.

Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson talk with Tara Kelley, founder of TJK Bookkeeping and a longtime friend of Laurie's, about one of the biggest struggles in the design industry: financial clarity. Tara built her career in corporate finance before starting her own firm, where she now works with several interior design clients.
The conversation covers why most designers never feel like they have a firm handle on their numbers, especially without dedicated support. Tara explains the value of working with a bookkeeper who specializes in design, since industry-specific knowledge helps her spot red flags, benchmark margins, and guide better decisions around marketing and staffing.
The group discusses the monthly P&L as Tara's go-to report, and why so many designers don't know what a P&L even is, largely because design software doesn't present financials in a useful way. They talk through profitability by product category, using appliances (low margin) versus cabinetry, tile, and upholstery (higher margin) as examples, and make the case for breaking revenue into visual, granular buckets so designers can see where their profit really comes from.
Tara shares that nearly all of her recurring clients came to her with messy books, and most engagements start with a cleanup project. Nile highlights how important that honesty is, since fear of judgment keeps many designers from getting help in the first place. Tara reassures listeners that she never judges, she just gets things cleaned up.
The episode also touches on bigger financial decisions, like investing in show houses, marketing events, and trade shows like High Point Market, and how these decisions often carry an emotional weight that can cloud good business judgment.
Tara closes with two pieces of advice for designers at any stage: keep personal and business finances completely separate, and reconcile accounts every month to catch errors before they compound. The conversation ends with a discussion of pricing models (hourly, flat fee, and project-based) and how each affects a designer's ability to track and protect their profit.

Laurie Laizure talks with Morgan Finley of Morgan and Hatch Design about the reel series that put Morgan on Laurie's radar, "Who's Gonna Clean That," and what it revealed about why designers should show more of the real, unfiltered version of their work.
Morgan explains how a single viral video, a fluted marble hood nobody wants to clean, drove roughly 3,000 new followers and kept compounding as shares and saves pushed it through the algorithm. Laurie adds a tip: repost a viral video again after about ten days, since it typically performs just as well.
The two dig into the industry's core communication problem. Laurie cites a recent poll where 95 percent of designers said the public doesn't understand their value, and both agree that's the industry's job to fix. Laurie's definition of the work: designers make the plan, then hold everyone, including the client, to it, catching problems like a crooked tile or a beautiful but impossible-to-clean finish before they become regrets.
Morgan shares her own shift from an aspirational content persona to a relatable one, and how showing her real, builder-grade home, instead of hiding it, made her content connect. They talk through simple production tools (background eliminators, CapCut, clean sound) and Morgan's advice to always include a "why me" statement so viewers know what makes a designer worth following.
Money comes up often. Post-pandemic pricing shifts, tariffs, and supply chain issues have changed costs significantly, and both agree a big part of the job is walking clients through what things actually cost. Morgan notes that budget size doesn't predict a good client relationship. What matters is whether the client values the designer's judgment.
They also discuss why designers rarely support each other publicly compared to fields like photography, and agree the real competition is homeowners who never learn a better option exists, not other designers.
Morgan describes cross-promoting with contractors and subcontractors, and Laurie shares ideas for local, client-relevant content that also builds goodwill with nearby businesses. They swap examples of practical, budget-conscious fixes, such as updating cabinet hardware instead of replacing custom cabinets and honing stone countertops instead of tearing them out, to show that good design advice is often about smart choices, not expensive ones
Laurie closes with a simple starting point: a clear bio with contact information, plus three pinned videos, an introduction, a company overview, and a project showcase, and mentions Interior Design Community's upcoming content challenge with free scripts and images for designers ready to start posting.

Chris Laumer-Giddens joins Laurie Laizure to talk about building science, the study of why homes fail and how to build them so they last for generations instead of twenty years. Chris works with his wife, Jody, who has owned LG Squared since 2006; he joined in 2012 after specializing in indoor air quality, rot, mold, and thermal failures. LG Squared handles architecture, interiors, and mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and structural design under one roof.
His clearest rule: "Foam is a four-letter word." The firm avoids spray foam and other toxic, plastic-based materials entirely, building instead with natural materials and traditional joinery. Chris has seen a client collapse from spray-foam fumes on-site and has replaced mechanical systems damaged by off-gassing. His real point is that improper installation, not any single material, is what causes most building failures.
Much of the problem, he says, comes from builders and architects who simply do not know what they do not know, often working from bad information that circulates as trade wisdom. He encourages designers and architects to ask questions without embarrassment, the same way architecture licensing exams teach you to find answers rather than memorize them.
That gap led Chris to get his GC license, and he eventually built about half a dozen homes, including a five-million-dollar off-grid homestead. He now often works as an owner's agent, vetting builders and catching costly mistakes before clients buy or build.
Pricing gets concrete. LG Squared's billable rate runs $350 to $500 an hour, padded roughly 30 percent for follow-up time, and wealthier clients tend to prefer a fixed lump sum over hourly billing. The firm now charges $2,500 for an initial two-hour site visit, down from offering it free, after giving away too many high-value ideas.
Chris also shares a sobering legal story. A $7,000 liability cap meant nothing when a lawsuit landed on LG Squared, and the firm ended up roughly $200,000 out of pocket because the builder did not defend them as promised. He and Jody have weathered two lawsuits and real PTSD from the experience.
The two also discuss running a firm together as spouses, working through early ego friction, and how Chris's YouTube content, which Jody avoids, became the firm's biggest source of trust-based, design-build clients. The episode closes with a tour of the couple's new apartment in a chateau in southwest France.

Jameelah Watkins-Mallett, founder of Lauren Wesley Designs and creator of the CASE Collective conference, talks with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson about trust between designers, real talk about money, and the path that took her from doing hair at twelve years old to running a thriving design and events business.
The conversation opens with a candid look at why designers hide their best work online, often out of fear of judgment from other designers rather than clients. That leads into a story about a breach of trust within a private community, where a comment in a group chat made its way back to a client. Jameelah and Laurie compare notes on the ground rules that keep community spaces safe, including zero tolerance for fraud and strict confidentiality.
Jameelah shares her career story: years in bridal hair and events with business partner Ebony, the referral that became her first interior project, a feature on Martha Stewart's blog, and the pandemic pivot that pushed her fully into interiors. Her first full year in business brought seven projects, almost entirely through word of mouth. She also describes the early luck of working with a contractor who ran his job site like clockwork, a level of professionalism she later realized was rare in the industry.
A large portion of the episode covers the CASE Collective conference, which Jameelah built to address underrepresentation in design. She talks through adjusting her messaging after learning some designers felt excluded by a conference designed to be inclusive, and the group discusses what it means to build community spaces around shared experience, whether that experience is rooted in race, geography, or access. The conversation also touches on how rural and urban designers face very different barriers to finding clients with design budgets.
The episode also tackles money directly. Jameelah and Laurie push back against the industry's discomfort with discussing pricing, profit margins, and paying yourself, and Jameelah notes that even a modest conference budget can run close to six figures. She shares a coaching example about helping a designer in a rural market find the right neighborhoods to target.
The group wraps with a discussion of content creation, weighing direct, education-first social content against rage-bait trends that can alienate potential clients, followed by a lightning round and details on the CASE Conference, happening October 1 through 3 in Atlanta.