There’s more to launching your interior design career than setting up a website, opening a business bank account, and establishing an LLC. The most crucial step is also the most difficult: Landing a new client. Even though the right project can catapult your career, newer designers might have a hard time finding a ready and willing customer who trusts them with their time, money, and space (especially when they aren’t equipped with a roster of industry connections, press coverage, or word-of-mouth recommendations). Sometimes, newer designers have to get a little creative—and, yes, scrappy.
To spark inspiration, five designers share with AD PRO the creative ways they landed clients early on in their careers. From utilizing the power of social media to embracing your “inner client,” these stories offer plenty of inspiration to take your career to the next level.
Become your own client
After eight years working under the helm of New York–based designer Nick Olsen, Tara McCauley was ready to launch her own firm. Though she had plenty of industry know-how and connections, she didn’t have a portfolio of her own work. So, she turned her Brooklyn-based apartment into an outlet for her creative impulse—complete with bold pops of color and a hand-painted terrazzo-patterned wall in the kitchen. “[It was] a laboratory for my boldest design ideas,” McCauley notes. “Surrounding myself with personally meaningful items collected over time makes me feel at home.”
In addition to developing the project like she would for a paying customer, she also hired a photographer to take some professional shots. “She found a way to capture everything I wanted to get in each angle and knew exactly how to deal with the lack of natural light,” the designer notes.
Fortunately, all of that investment paid off: McCauley’s apartment has since been featured in New York Magazine as well as on NBC New York’s Open House segment. “I think that having my own space published lent me a bit of credibility at a point in my career where I didn’t have the capacity outside my full-time job to build a portfolio of client work,” she shares. “At the same time, when I speak with potential clients, I do often ask them to keep in mind that in my own apartment I made a lot of bold choices that suited my personal style, but are not representative of what I would do in their spaces.”
Spring Sale: Become an AD PRO member today and save $100 on an annual membership.
Leverage your first hustle
Though Susan Bohlert Smith is no stranger to the interior design industry, she actually started her career as a muralist, working under the tutelage of a restoration artist and finish expert. (One career highlight? Tending to Carol Burnett’s home in New Mexico.) Smith continued her mural work when she moved back home to Alabama, and noticed a lot of clients would ask for her expertise outside of painting.
“Whenever I was working with a designer on a project, I would recommend that they defer to the designer to be respectful,” Bohlert Smith says. “When a designer was not involved, and the client connected with me directly, they would ask me to create an overall look in the room I was painting in and to be honest with them about what needed to change.”