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.

Jaclyn Isaac, an interior designer at Donnie Douglas Designs, built Nest Freight, a new freight-and-receiving platform for the trade, after two costly wake-up calls. While seven months pregnant and managing a high-end install in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she discovered her receiver had left boxes unopened for months, resulting in thousands of dollars in damage and a ruined client experience. Separately, a $900 freight quote for $6,000 worth of hand-carved Italian marble tile came back at $3,000 when it was time to actually ship. A friend with a logistics background, now her co-founder, got the same shipment delivered for $541.

That gap between quoted and actual freight cost is the core problem Nest Freight solves. Jaclyn says her team sees average savings of $150 to $200 every time they requote a shipment, and the long-term goal is to use collective industry volume to negotiate better group rates directly with carriers.

Nest Freight soft launched in March with almost no marketing. Jaclyn's original goal was 100 signed-up firms; the platform is at about 21 so far, entirely through word of mouth. She and Laurie discuss why adoption has been slower than the savings would suggest: most designers have never thought to requote their own freight, and getting a second quote feels like extra work on top of an already full plate.

The company has expanded into receiving in New Jersey, Southern California and San Diego, and Florida, matching where most of its current users are based. Jaclyn is direct about what makes receiving hard to get right: pricing transparency, since designers routinely get surprise invoices weeks after delivery, and inspection quality, since a generic warehouse may not catch the kind of damage a designer would flag on a high-end piece. She shares an example of spotting small tears in leather on a studio chair that a standard receiver likely would have missed.

The conversation also covers insurance gaps most designers do not consider until something goes wrong, including freight carriers' low default liability caps and receivers not insuring items in storage on a designer's behalf. Jaclyn and Laurie both recommend using AI to review vendor contracts and identify actual liabilities before signing.

Jaclyn is offering IDC listeners a discount through Nest Freight, code IDC2026, for one free month.

Christie Leu spent fifteen years as a self-employed fine craft artist before a contractor called her a serial redecorator and asked her to help style his clients' homes. That request became Christie Leu Interiors, now in its 13th year serving Maryland, Northern Virginia, Washington D.C., and the Eastern Shore.

Leu traces her business instincts back to age fifteen, when she noticed she was earning about $100 an hour making pottery at night and $1 an hour babysitting during the day. That early awareness of her own value still drives how she prices today: $300 an hour for herself, $110 an hour for her assistant, $150 an hour for drafters. Her take on flat fee pricing is direct. Skipping hour tracking because you charge a flat fee is how designers lose money without realizing it.

Much of the conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson traces how directly her art background feeds her design work, from color memory to composition to balancing an off-center fireplace, plus a formative tax seminar at 23 that taught her to read her own numbers from day one.

One of the episode's sharpest stories involves a lighting vendor whose polished pitch on lumens and product specs never answered the question Leu actually needed answered: what's the payoff for the designer, and how do I explain the value to my client? She pushed back hard, and the larger lesson holds: vendors chasing designer referrals need to speak to the designer's business reality, not just the product's features.

Leu also unpacks a client's comment questioning an email line item on her invoice. Her answer: about 80 percent of her time goes to email, coordinating contractors, tradespeople, vendors, and warehouses so that a twenty-component window treatment order stays on schedule. Actual designing is closer to 8 percent of the job.

She closes with a peer group she helped start, built on a business-of-design foundation and still meeting monthly with outside experts, plus a quick lightning round: kitchens and baths are her favorite rooms, gray is the trend she's ready to retire, and murals and window treatments are the splurges she always defends.

Karen Laos learned to negotiate at six, when her dad handed her a few dollars at a flea market and told her to have fun but never pay full price. Twenty-five years into a communication career, she joins Laurie Laizure to talk about the part designers struggle with most: what to say in the seconds after you name your price.

Karen has coached at NASA, Google, and other large brands. She left corporate in 2019 to help 10 million women overcome self-doubt and communicate with confidence in 10 years, and she is about halfway there. The turning point was a boardroom where she could not get the words out. Her boss shut down the meeting, then told her she could have simply tabled it. Karen's takeaway was not embarrassment. It was a question: why do I keep asking for permission?

The most quotable moment in the episode is a negotiation she ran from a loading dock. An HR contact asked her rate, she gave it, and the line went quiet. Karen let the silence sit, then asked How does that land with you. The answer was that she was significantly higher than other coaches under consideration. Karen said, I recognize that I'm higher than most. Is that a deal breaker? It was not.

She also walks through a recent decision to hold a new speaking minimum, turning down $3,500 and a paid trip rather than negotiate against her own word. Within days she met someone on a plane and opened a six-figure conversation. Her framing: your rate is a decision, not a feeling you wait to have. The scary part is the trapeze gap between letting go of one bar and catching the next.

Laurie brings it back to design economics. Reverse-engineer the number from salary, rent, overhead, insurance, and retirement, and unprofitable projects stop being emotional decisions. She also raises the scenario designers fight most: a client reverse-images a chair and finds it cheaper online. Karen's answer is to handle it proactively by deciding what you are available for and setting the parameters at the start of the engagement, rather than defending them mid-project.

The lightning round delivers the practical layer. The sentences to practice: that doesn't work for me, and I'm not available for that. The word to retire: sorry. The credibility leaks: I think, maybe, kind of, does that make sense. And the cheapest improvement available to anyone, which is recording yourself on a client call and listening back.

You get maybe twenty good photos of a finished install in a year. There are 365 days in the year. What fills the rest? Most designers cycle the same images or go quiet, while the thing clients actually want to see- the process and the reasoning and the real cost- never leaves the designer's head.

Shannon Ggem hit that wall for ten years. She posted three times a week and earned roughly one new follower every three months, most of them people she met face to face at trade shows. Then she agreed to be the private case study for a new content system from Laurie Laizure at Interior Design Community. This To-The-Trade conversation is the thirty-day debrief.

The first fix was not strategic. Laurie told Shannon to drop the filters, and the numbers moved immediately. In a feed increasingly full of AI-generated talking heads, looking like an actual person is now an advantage.

The second fix was scripting, which Shannon resisted hard. Being told to be authentic and then handed a script feels contradictory. The comparison changed her mind: scripted videos are cleaner, shorter, and free of her natural repetition. The workflow is practical. Build the script from your own talking points, edit it in Notes until it sounds like you, paste it into the teleprompter in Edits, record one paragraph at a time, delete bad takes as you go, and curate your photos before you open the app.

Shannon's most useful admission is about the times she reverted to her old habits. Those posts took longer and performed worse. Her top two videos in the whole feed were made with no makeup, in pajamas, in about ten minutes.

The back half widens out. Laurie tracks what featuring a brand does for that brand, which is fifty new followers at minimum and sometimes 250, and makes the case for naming makers out loud so handcrafted work becomes desirable instead of anonymous. Shannon talks about posting on drawings, a topic she assumed nobody wanted, and finding that clients rebuilding after the fires very much did. Both push toward publishing real timelines and cost ranges alongside the satisfying before and after reels.

There is also a good stretch on emotional resistance, which for Shannon disguised itself as a file management problem and nearly killed a post about her first career as a scream queen. That post was a hit.

The month ended at 158,800 views and 990 new followers, plus a licensing conversation, a referral, and two paid brand collaborations. IDC is opening the process up to the full 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.