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The Interior Designer’s Blue Ocean

Most interior designers spend their careers competing in a market they did not choose.

They inherit the industry’s assumptions about what clients value, how services should be delivered, what belongs on a website, how proposals should be written, and even what kind of client is worth pursuing. Then they spend years trying to persuade prospective clients that they are somehow different from dozens of other firms making nearly identical promises.

They spend heavily on beautiful photography. The service is personal. The process is customized. The firm is experienced. The work is luxurious, livable, timeless, layered, thoughtful, curated, and deeply reflective of the client.

The problem is that everyone else is saying some version of exactly this same ol’, same ol’. To you it sounds different. To the prospective client, it sounds just the same.

This is what business strategists call a red ocean, and yes, the red is to signal bloody competition. An existing market space crowded with competitors fighting over limited demand.

Many designers I work with don’t think they have all that much competition, but that’s a myopic view. Just ask your prospective client who may have spent hours on Houzz or other sites and finally quit because there were just too many options!

The ocean is red because everyone is battling for the same clients, using the same language, emphasizing the same credentials, and trying to win on increasingly subtle distinctions that may be obvious to the designer but are nearly invisible to the client.

A Blue Ocean Strategy Asks a Very Different Question

Instead of asking, “How can I beat the other designers in my market?” a blue ocean strategy asks, “Where is there uncontested market space that no one has claimed?”

That may sound like the kind of thing only giant corporations can do, but that’s a misnomer. I don’t mean that an independent design firm is going to disrupt the entire interior design industry. That will never happen, and it doesn’t need to for you to find a highly-profitable niche.

A clever blue ocean strategy doesn’t need to disrupt a local market; it can simply ignore it and embrace a newly defined segment of prospective clients.

You Don’t Need to Become Southwest Airlines

You do not need to become the Southwest Airlines of interior design. Southwest did not win by becoming a slightly better version of American or Delta. It changed the basis of competition. It reduced or eliminated many things traditional airlines treated as essential—first class seating, meals, assigned seating, baggage transfers through large hub airports—and raised other factors dramatically: turnaround time, low fares, and convenience for travelers who might otherwise have driven.

They even made “friendly” a unique competitive edge and carefully hired for that.

In your case, you don’t need to “beat” the other airlines (designers) in your market, you just need to find a route that no one else is flying. Just one route will do. Maybe your route will be from Hot-as-Hell, AZ to Freezin-my-Rear, AK. Fine, just so long as no one else is competing for that route.

The True Value of Industry Case Studies

In the business school classroom, we teach that companies can often learn more from studying case studies of companies in unrelated industries. That’s where the real breakthroughs can come.

Which brings me to the case study of Yellow Tail wine and how much interior designer’s can learn from their winning blue ocean strategy.

The wine industry has long competed on identifiable features like prestige, aging, complexity, terminology, awards, and a certain intimidating “sophistication.” Because of consolidation and giant marketing budgets, it is almost impossible for a new brand to compete in that bloody “red ocean.”

Then came Yellow Tail, which essentially asked, “What if we targeted the millions of people are not even wine drinkers because they find the category confusing, pretentious, or unnecessarily complicated?”

What if reducing the complexity, simplifying the choices, making the brand fun, and appealing to people who were not traditional wine buyers would turn them around? What if we could get even Hank Hill, standing on the sidewalk with his friends, to set his beer down to sample some new concoction?

They did just that and the results were extraordinary. Casella Wines (maker of Yellow Tail) expected to sell about 25,000 cases of Yellow Tail during its first year in the United States.

Instead, it sold nearly nine times that amount.

Within just two years, Yellow Tail had become the fastest-growing wine brand in the history of the American wine industry, and within just three years, cumulative sales had reached roughly 25 million cases.

Yellow Tail soon became the number-one imported wine in the United States and, for a time, the best-selling 750ml red wine in America, outselling many established French, Italian, and Californian competitors, who had neither the ability, nor the desire to compete in this low-cost, lowbrow market.

Clients v. Nearly Clients

The most interesting blue ocean opportunities are often found not among high-end clients who already understand and value traditional interior design. They are found among what blue ocean consultants call “near-clients:” people who have money, homes, and aspirations, but are dissatisfied with the current offerings of interior designers as they don’t seem to offer what this customer wants.

Maybe, like fine wines, they consider traditional interior design too complex, too elite, too sophisticated for them.

This sort of insight is where Blue Oceans begin.

For example, some clients may not be resisting the end results of professional design, but rather the traditional design process. They may imagine it to be slow, opaque, expensive, intimidating, subjective, and filled with endless meetings.

Another group may value design deeply but want a more rigorous project-management experience, with budgets, timelines, online dashboards, and accountability.

Another may want speed and simplicity more than unlimited customization. (Mark Zuckerberg is the client of a consulting client of mine. For the 3,000 sq. ft. grand room of one of his Maui homes, he wanted built-in cabinets, one large sofa, and four matching chairs. That’s it. He wanted simple and fast.)

None of these by itself is a “target market,” but they provide the seeds to develop a true blue ocean, an uncontested market space.

(Back to Zuckerberg for a moment. Imagine the websites of 10 “high-end residential” designers. I’m here to tell you that to a lot of people, all of your brilliant work and all of your expensive photography will all start looking alike to Mark. Now, imagine a website that shows a giant, magnificent grand room looking out onto the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean. In that room is a single sofa. Now that will get his attention! That will stand out.)

The Four Actions Framework

Blue Ocean Strategy relies on a simple but demanding framework built around four questions.

* What should be reduced well below the industry standard?

* What should be eliminated?

* What should be raised well above the industry standard?

* What should be created that the industry has never really offered before?

Below, paid subscribers will find a complete video tutorial on how to answer these questions, and a case study of how to create an uncontested market space of their own. I’ll walk you through the process of mapping your current market, identifying “near-clients,” and the process of deciding what to reduce, eliminate, raise, and create, to shape the result into a differentiated strategic position that you can own!

Your own uncontested market space.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit idbrief.substack.com