TRANSCRIPT
William Hanke (00:02)
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Panes the podcast where we talk with real window treatment and awning professionals.
about what’s working and marketing, what’s changing in the industry, and how to grow smarter. Today’s guest is the owner of The Great Curtain Company in Austin, Texas, a showroom known to locals as the Disneyland of Curtains. Her roots in the business run deep. She grew up working side by side with her mom. We’re gonna dig into that a little bit.
her mom who ran a decorating den franchise and then co-founded their own drapery business in 2006. Since then she helped grow the company into one of the largest curtain showrooms in the Gulf Coast region expanding from retail into trade services, custom fabrication, and most recently a new educational platform called Art of Drapery Academy.
She’s a savvy sales leader, designer advocate, and unapologetic fan of American-made sourcing.
Lexi Schultz, welcome to the show. Excited to dig into some of this stuff. There’s a lot to unpack here already, right?
Lexi Schultz (01:09)
Hey, well, thanks so much for having me. ⁓
I’m so excited too.
I really appreciate you guys and I can’t wait to tell you more about our story and kind of how we work.
William Hanke (01:22)
Yeah, yeah, well, why don’t you go ahead and take me back? Take me back. How did the great curtain company come to be?
Lexi Schultz (01:29)
Sure.
So my mom, Lauren Schultz, she has owned a decorating den franchise since the early 90s.
So when we moved to Texas, I very, at a very young age was following her around at, you know, site visits and things like that, kind of helping her with books and things like that. And she had this franchise for probably a solid 10 years and she grew her franchise into one of the biggest decked-in franchises in the central Texas region. And after she did that for
long time, she decided that she didn’t want to be a part of a franchise anymore. She really wanted to dig deep and do her own thing. So she did her own interior design for a long time. But as the early 2000s came around, she had decided, you know what,
I want to go back to window treatments. Window treatments were always a passion of hers. And in my entire childhood, we grew up with the most extravagant swag boards and all of the OG 90s stuff that you remember,
William Hanke (02:16)
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (02:19)
know, wallpapered drapes, wallpapered walls, wallpapered everything and draperies that match.
And so I grew up with a love of the same textiles and just the overall craftsmanship that go into this. So in the early 2000s, she decided, you know what, I’m done with doing interior design exclusively. I just want to do window treatments again. And she built this storefront from scratch in 2006. And as I was graduating high school, I had kind of two paths to choose. You I could either kind of go along with what I thought I was going to do, which was graphic design.
and I’ve been noodling around in Photoshop since I was nine years old. So I had a really firm grasp of design and layouts for magazines and doing all of our advertising and things like that. But when she built this showroom and I did all of that for a couple of years when we first started, I really wanted to get into the tactile beauty of fabric, actually touching and seeing and working with real textiles versus everything being conceptual on the computer all the time.
So I really leaned back into interior design.
but still work both side by side. So in 2006, we built this beautiful storefront. It is not a franchise.
It is family owned still to this day, 20 years later. It’s still the two of us. And we have a great staff and installer on staff and everything to be able to help us make some of the most beautiful treatments you can possibly imagine. Yeah.
William Hanke (03:37)
I love that. That’s great. What’s
it been like building something like this with your mom?
Lexi Schultz (03:42)
It’s been both fun and challenging.
So I am an only child. So she is literally my best friend. She’s everything to me. And so when we built this storefront, was initially her vision of just having wall to wall custom draperies that were ready made. We had a concept in 2006 when we first started where it was dominantly just beautiful silk draperies, because silk was the thing in the early 2000s.
a very Tuscan Italian Mediterranean style showroom for the central Texas region of that time.
And her concept was just, want to have beautiful off the shelf, high quality, handmade in the US type drapery. And we did that for many years until we saw more architects building
and developing bigger homes, bigger windows that required custom. So that’s where we just fully went into custom.
But building a brand side by side with a family member.
It’s been really rewarding, know, her having all of the experience to be able to produce a business model that allows me to kind of pick up the torch now and be a face person for our brand and still be very much in touch with today’s trends,
having all of the knowledge, but also the current foresight of where,
you know, our business model is going. It’s been fun working with her side by side for so long. Yeah.
William Hanke (04:58)
That’s great. So my
daughter Amber works with me too. she so I understand I understand the dynamic ⁓
Lexi Schultz (05:01)
⁓ yeah, for sure. We certainly have
our moments. I’m not gonna lie and say we don’t have an all out, you know, fight over something or a concept both of us don’t agree on. We do a lot of designing for the showroom as far as having display pieces and like what brands to bring on.
William Hanke (05:12)
Right.
Lexi Schultz (05:18)
So we don’t always see eye to eye as like what drapery we want to make on the wall or what Roman shade we want to make for a display for this season. But beyond that, we’ve been working together so long that we really have a very
know,
tandem style of how we’re gonna do the future building of the store.
William Hanke (05:34)
Yeah, it’s fun. The dynamics great. And I’ve given Amber, my daughter permission to tell me no, because as a visionary, you’re like, we should do this, and we should do this, and we should do this, right? So I need somebody to kind of keep me focused. ⁓
Lexi Schultz (05:39)
yeah, absolutely.
Exactly, exactly.
She’s a very, she’s a great idea person and I like to be more of an executor.
So it’s a good combination, but sometimes where it’s like we have so many ideas, but we want to do them all at one time. And it’s not
totally logistical to do that, but we can.
William Hanke (06:02)
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I know you probably started out in the mail room or whatever and worked your way up. So how have you seen over the last 20 years the businesses evolved?
Lexi Schultz (06:04)
Yeah.
Yes, exactly, yes!
Yeah, so like I mentioned before, we started off,
our concept was strictly just walk-in traffic. We did newspaper magazine ads in the day. We had magazine ads. There was no real internet advertising at this time. It hadn’t become quite a thing just yet.
And so we really relied heavily on being open six days a week, you know, 10 to five, having clients come in and do, you know, design on the fly where they bring pillows or they bring sketches of their window configurations. And
pictures on a camera phone or even print it out at that time. And so people would bring a lot of homework with them just without even making an appointment. It was full walk in and we could sit down and look at things on the wall and go, this is the one. But in the last decade, specifically from like 2013 to 2019,
we saw a huge shift in not only not wanting to something off the shelf, really honing in on customization. So we brought on a lot of different suppliers and vendors when it came to hardware.
when it came to fabric and then ultimately buying in and building our workrooms that can support a much larger scale than we had initially thought the showroom was ever going to be. So in the last 10 years or so, we’ve
William Hanke (07:23)
wow.
Lexi Schultz (07:25)
seen walk-in traffic kind of dip. I’m pretty sure anyone in this industry who’s got a storefront, a brick and mortar has seen the same thing since the pandemic.
But we started to see just a bigger trend at that point of
online people, different vendors from around the country providing things and being able to drop ship. So the world really changed probably after 2013 for window treatments specifically
and having to really cater to more of a one-on-one experience, making an in-store appointment. Walk-in traffic wasn’t the big flow anymore.
We had to spend a lot more on advertising to get calls and build campaigns around that that would support people finding us, not just assuming they’re.
walking by or getting a coffee, which we’re in a coffee shop area, and coming in like they used to and going, this is perfect. Let’s buy this right now. It doesn’t work that way anymore.
William Hanke (08:10)
Yeah, yeah, the audience is still there. They’ve just changed location, right?
Lexi Schultz (08:13)
Absolutely, absolutely.
we change with it. The beauty of what we’ve done in keeping it small, but expanding internally, my mom and I are really good at pivoting. So we can kind of see trends coming at us and go, okay, we’ve seen enough of this as far as it’s shift in our marketing. We’ve seen enough of this type of group of people reaching out. We’ve seen enough of this ⁓ type of product out in the market that we need to jump into, that we need to bring on. So we’re good at adapting.
But it’s certainly, it’s been kind of a Mr. Toad’s wild ride, you know, because up and down with the retail marketplace ⁓ today, can be no one tomorrow, there could be 50 people calling. So it’s one of those things that we just have had to adapt specifically since the pandemic, but even before that, we were seeing walk-ins and the concierge level needing to be more of how we built our brand around. Yeah.
William Hanke (09:03)
Yeah,
what’s one thing you’ve learned working in a family business that others might not expect?
Lexi Schultz (09:09)
probably just the amount of time in your life that you’re going to dedicate to your job. A lot of people and you see the memes online that are like, it must be great to run your own business. And then you see somebody like completely passed out asleep, you know, at the wheel or just waiting for the day to end because they don’t, they’re so tired. And so having people understand that you are going to take your business everywhere with you, whether you are sitting in the showroom, whether you are
driving home, you’re going to be pulling over and sending a text to somebody. Whether you’re on an airplane at an airport and you’re managing an installation back at home, you are texting them and telling them, I can’t talk. I’m getting on an airplane, but I’ll get back to you in two hours. I even equate it to recently we went to Disney World and I’m laughing saying I’m sitting here with Mickey ears and I’m texting on my store phone to clients while I’m on the monorail. You know what I mean? Like this is the level that you take with you and blessing and a curse. But at the same time, you’re
You’re so into your business and
having your connections and your installers. There’s not really any one person you can pass the buck to when
it’s your own business that you independently own and operate with yourself or a family member.
William Hanke (10:18)
Yeah, and it’s hard to separate, right, from the
Lexi Schultz (10:21)
It is super hard to separate.
That’s
what we’re kind of trying to kind of build in 2026, our systems that are going to allow us to not necessarily be more autonomous, but at least have touch points that we can prioritize
because we manage anywhere from 30 to 50 clients a month with 30 to 50 installations happening a month.
And so any point of the day, nighttime, two in the morning, I’ll wake up in a sweat and have a question on an order.
It doesn’t stop. There’s nothing you can do to really like turn it off when you have your own.
business, which makes us very successful. We’re very much all about our clients’
William Hanke (10:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely think that’s a big part of it. You want everybody to have a great experience overall, right?
And you’ll do.
Lexi Schultz (11:01)
service.
I grew up with the mantra of the customer is always right. And then you have just this background of generations of my mom
and her mother being in an industry of customer service like this. So it means a lot to be able to take that and bring it into the
2026 because you don’t see it as much anymore. People who really care about your experience, whether it’s at a coffee shop, a restaurant or walking into a high end furniture store.
The general feedback I feel as a consumer going in is I wish you would service me like I service my people, you know? And so that’s just what we’re trying to keep going with. We’re not going to stop that.
William Hanke (11:32)
Right.
That’s great. What’s one moment working with your mom that still makes you laugh or taught you something big, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time?
Lexi Schultz (11:47)
We used to hours building magazine ads because this is when magazines were the thing. Early 2000s, Texas Home and Living, in Austin we have a company called Austin Woman Magazine. We were in the Austin Statesman.
This is how we had our clients find us was hard magazine ads before the invention of AI or the internet when it came to advertising.
We used to be, because of my graphic design background, I would just kind of take the reins and start building the ad. But then she and I would sit there and start tweaking it. And this would be turned into like, you know, having wine night and making pasta and working on the ads and things like that that were just felt so monumental at the time because they were so difficult. But now 20 years fast forward, we are doing.
such a different approach to advertising that, you I feel like all that work we put in in the early 2000s to build the brand and be able to know what colors work and what stylistically we wanted our ads to look like has made our job a lot easier when telling our
advertisers now, hey, here’s what we want. Here’s our branding. It’s really built this like ⁓ runway for us to be able to not stress about how we want to present ourselves to the public.
So
We spent hours laughing, crying, yelling at the computer, making ads, uploading them at 11:55 p.m. before they were due the next day to go to print. And then nowadays I’m like, I go back and I laugh at it because that was so much physical work that we had to do. A lot of it’s been the relief valve’s been pulled by using AI,
but AI is just a tool you can use only if you know what you’re doing with it. So having all this background as far as how to make this brand feel cohesive through the years,
has been the biggest like,
⁓ I’m glad we put in the time on that, you know? ⁓
William Hanke (13:37)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So I want to shift a little bit talk about sales, buyer habits and things you mentioned.
You mentioned retail has changed a lot since the pandemic, especially people are shopping a little bit differently now. Walk us through what somebody sees when they walk into your showroom.
Lexi Schultz (13:52)
Mm-hmm.
William Hanke (13:56)
What’s the first kind of like wow piece that they notice?
Lexi Schultz (14:00)
Absolutely. So I know we’re a little cropped right now, but we have about a thousand square feet of a very long showroom. So when they walk in, I have these stunning velvet draperies with a big set of trim on them. And they kind of set the tone because they’re oversized, they’re 14 foot tall, they’re on a gorgeous rod. And they kind of separate the front half of the showroom, which is dominantly display product and Roman shades and a tactile finished product. So they can see what a finished drapery or cornice box looks like.
And then as they kind of like explore the rest of our showroom, we’ve got all of our fabrics. We’ve got shelving units.
We’ve got everything back here that feels more curated and more come sit down and explore the materials is kind of the feel in the back of the store. That’s more of the studio. This is more of the front facing part of the store where people can touch and feel and see a pinch pleat and pull it on a track system. So having a really dynamic amount of visceral.
reaction when people walk in to see textiles from silk to linen to velvet, everything, and then really knowing they can step back here and, my gosh, look at all this choice. That’s where we come in and really provide that concierge service of pairing what they want with the right fabric. So we’ve got studio and then we’ve got like actionable, visible workroom in the front.
William Hanke (15:10)
Yeah. Is the, is the showroom continually changing? Are you guys pulling stuff down, putting new stuff up?
Lexi Schultz (15:18)
my gosh, yes, Will. I mean, after this call, I literally have to like, you know, go take my jacket off and move a drapery two feet to the right, because we just got some new stuff. So I’m always up and down on a ladder. We’re always here after hours rotating and changing things, especially if we bring on a new vendor. And it’s really hard to room in a small amount of square footage to keep bringing on bigger and better things. But we do really drill down on what are our top sellers. That’s been the most important thing. I do not keep in my showroom anything that I don’t actually sell.
William Hanke (15:20)
Thank
Lexi Schultz (15:47)
because every inch of square footage is profit. It’s also ⁓ a vision to show my clientele of what is the latest and the greatest. So anything that doesn’t meet a lot of standards for us, we’ve been able to just kind of trim the fat over the years. But we will always sit down and probably rotate at least once, if not twice a year, major display products. ⁓ And then we have kind of a big clearance sale seasonally so that people can come in and buy one off display drapery or a beautiful mock Roman topper or something so that it doesn’t just go to waste.
William Hanke (16:17)
I think you’ve got great energy and I think obviously that plays into all of this as well. So what role does story playing, inspiration play in closing a sale today?
Lexi Schultz (16:27)
Yeah, mean, just what we just talked about having the storefront when a client walks in makes them feel like, wow, these people know what they’re doing. They’re going to know how drapery is supposed to hang. you know, what every section of my store kind of has a slightly different vision. So there’s kind of a neutral version of the of the linens and the shears and the things that are very now, you know, very background oriented. And that section of the store shows a story of neutrality and how you can use that as a backdrop.
but there are some wildly flamboyant birds and geometrics and things like that as you continue into the storefront for the person who’s more of the maximalist. I’ve just felt that.
William Hanke (16:58)
.
Lexi Schultz (17:04)
having so many products on display of so many different styles, never just drilling down and doing, I’m doing my whole store in white, or I’m doing my whole store in black and white. It just doesn’t work because in drapery, no two homes are the same. I almost never sell the same thing twice the same way. So having people come in and see the storytelling that I can build for them, this is the neutral. See how this resonates with your home after I see photos of the space or if I’ve made a house call.
⁓ No, you have all these beautiful wallpapered pieces you brought with you. Let me show you what you can do over here with grasscloth textured and all kinds of cool embroidered silks to really bring their space to life. So mixing and matching and never having a limited amount of things to show has really played well to the storytelling and the support of the sale. Because if the client can’t touch it and they can’t see it and they can’t actually walk in and go, that’s what my house can look like. I found that almost instantly they lose
the ability to understand what drapery’s value is in a space.
William Hanke (18:04)
I love that you’ve turned it into an experience. ⁓ And I think for like me as a husband going to something like that with my wife, because she’s got a vision, she’s got the ideas, and I’m like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. ⁓ I can see having that kind of an experience kind of, you know, making us get it a little bit. ⁓ And she would have a great time.
Lexi Schultz (18:08)
yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yep, yep, absolutely, absolutely. We always joke.
I always have so many different couples and different dynamics that come in our showroom.
and we have a fun Mexican restaurant kind of in our shopping center and I always laugh and say, okay, if the husbands don’t want to deal with it, they can go next door and have a taco and a margarita and come on back when we make all the decisions. So it’s fun to have the ability for people to be comfortable in a space where they don’t feel like, my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Someone’s gotta take the lead. So I try and really embrace everybody’s ability that whether you know everything that you want for your house or you know nothing, I definitely can relate to you on those levels.
William Hanke (18:40)
Yeah, yeah.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see buyers make when it comes to drapery?
Lexi Schultz (19:04)
Well, there’s a lot, unfortunately. ⁓ But I can definitely just highlight one or two that I’m seeing a lot recently. Buyers, again, without having the knowledge of what custom can do for your home, that only comes with years of experience, someone like me to come in and go, OK, here’s what is going to happen when you do custom. But in addition to that, having the storefront touch it, see it, actually experience it, and put your hands on it.
Because buyers are making
huge amount of investment right now in these kind of semi-custom drop ship type draperies from online.
And while there’s certainly a marketplace for that, I feel like if we’re comparing apples to apples, and that’s a lot of what I’ve had to re-educate and re redirect the language and the voice with my client is you’re showing me an Amazon drapery or you’re showing me something from a drop shipping company overseas.
and you’re bringing it in and assuming that this is going to look exactly like what my showroom looks. Why doesn’t my showroom cost what this costs? And so I’m finding clients are even making those decisions on their own. They’re not spending small amounts of money. They could easily still spend five, six, 700 bucks on a ready-made set they’ve never touched, they’ve never seen. There’s no representative to sell it to them. They’re gonna get it and then they’re gonna call me because perhaps the hardware fell off the wall or it didn’t support the weight or it wasn’t at all what they wanted. And I gotta come in and save the day, whether it means rework.
which we do a lot and we offer that. I don’t judge. I’m happy to hem, alter, pleat, do whatever you want with your existing stuff. But sometimes we got to go from full scratch where you made an investment that just did not work. And if we can’t repurpose it somewhere else because I’m a good guy and I want to help you, we got to start from scratch with what you really needed, which was custom from the beginning. So people not fully exploring the options and just assuming.
William Hanke (20:40)
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (20:44)
Amazon can take care of me or this site that I got retargeted by on Instagram can take care of me and then they’ll make an investment and then go, gosh, what I’d spent on this, I wish I had just put a little more in doing it the right way. So that’s what I’m seeing a lot of right now and trying to actively educate everybody the difference of it.
William Hanke (20:56)
Yeah.
That’s great. Yeah. You run into that. I think it’s called sunk cost fallacy, right? Where they’ve sunk all this money into something and they don’t want to scrap it and start over because I’ve already put all this money into it.
Lexi Schultz (21:12)
Exactly. As we
say in the South here, you’re spending good money after bad. You’re literally spending good money and then all of a sudden you’re like, I have to do this again because I didn’t pay attention to all the nuances behind it. So yeah, I totally get it. It happens a lot. It is a learning curve. I’m trying to save people some money here because if you just skip that step entirely and talk to a real person like me, I’m going be able to tell you 10 reasons why that will work or that won’t work kind of installation.
William Hanke (21:18)
Yeah.
learning curve. ⁓
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk American made.
Work behind your commitment to sourcing domestically.
Lexi Schultz (21:47)
Yep. So this is something that I felt really passionately about. ⁓
About maybe eight to 10 years ago, we started really seeing just the lack of quality and products and manufacturing that we were having that was imported in second or third generations kind of re-tagged and sold to me through a high-end brand.
And I’d go, OK, you know,
this product doesn’t meet the standards of what I’m selling. I’m selling a high-end luxury experience to this client.
This product has is riddled with flaws. This product doesn’t work or support. It’s not consistent enough.
So we actively in the last five years and even before this tariff nuttiness, which we’ve really amped it up in this past year, ⁓ have tried hard to source not only local to Austin, we have several companies that are ⁓ steel makers that do like wrought iron fences and things like that in our community that we work with to make some of our in-house ⁓ private labeled brands of drapery hardware so that we can skip over a lot of steps when it comes to shipping or dealing with customs or any of that.
William Hanke (22:37)
⁓
Lexi Schultz (22:45)
Now I’m not saying there’s not a part or two that’s just impossible to make because the US is really, is really lacking a lot of infrastructure when it comes to mills and supplies that we need in the drapery industry. So there are some rings and components that I’ve started sourcing from Europe or Canada and other suppliers around the country and around the world. But as far as the guts of it, having a manufacturer that is always sewing my product here in the States, we have three workrooms that we’ve bought into. Local,
in North Texas and then in another state.
So I have three workrooms working simultaneously to sew all my product by hand in addition to making sure that it’s inspected and shipped and all made within the states. The hardware we stock here in our warehouse here in Austin to avoid a lot of freight issues around the country.
So we’re just making it and stocking it. In addition to that, having materials.
with base cloth ability for me to print onto is kind of been something we’ve started dabbling with in the last five years because of supply chain issues and with COVID and everything,
was sometimes you’d find a pattern you love and it just immediately got deleted from the mill or you’d never hear from that mill again. So we’re starting to develop in our graphic side of things, a line of custom printed materials where the base cloth is here in the States, it’s woven here, it’s stocked by the thousands and we can just cut it.
literally have it printed with a pattern on it that’s never going to get discontinued.
So we’ve really tried to build our own infrastructure to allow us to be nearly pandemic proof as they say, to be nearly tariff proof to the most ability that we can.
William Hanke (24:17)
That’s great. Can you walk us through how you balance the custom printing in stock goods and the mills little fabrics?
Lexi Schultz (24:23)
Yeah,
absolutely.
So we have kind of tiers of price points that I present to my clientele. It just depends on what the project requires.
Sometimes people are looking for a basic off-white linen or neutral, and that’s something that I stock here in the States. And I’ve got maybe eight to 10 fabrics that we keep on hand at all times to be able to manufacture and make huge size draperies in a super high quality fabric. So there’s kind of tier one.
Perhaps I’m in a project scope where we need a really specific stripe and it just doesn’t exist in any of the already prefabbed collections. You know, you’ve got your fabric cuts, you’ve got your trend fabrics and some of the bigger names out there, but perhaps the actual print just doesn’t exist.
So we will pivot to a custom print job. Yes, you’re going to spend a little more, but considering what you’re getting, no one else is going to have this drapery on their walls. We are
making the materials design online, we’re getting the color dyes to
match your Benjamin Moore or your Sherwin Williams paints, and then we’re going ahead and doing test printing and then ultimately printing the full design. So we’ve got kind of tier two if it ends up where we can’t find what we’re looking for elsewhere.
And then tier three, I have a lot of suppliers actually right now out of Belgium and Europe that are building and making beautiful linen textiles for me to bring into the States.
that I’m
by the bulk to be able to keep here and never have to have anyone else have access to their exact exclusives for our company that we can print on, that we can actually store here, and then ultimately sew and fabricate with our local workrooms.
So we’re working hard to make sure there’s a budget and a price point for everyone, but still with the forefront idea of keeping stock in the States, making sure it’s made for the customer at the level they need.
William Hanke (25:51)
Wow.
That’s great.
Lexi Schultz (26:03)
Yeah.
William Hanke (26:03)
have tariffs and supply chain issues kind of affected your overall decision making?
Lexi Schultz (26:09)
Specifically this last year, huge. Like I said, we are trying really hard to stock the product so that we are not having to bring in, you know, 100 yards here, 100 yards from over here and make sure that we’re always staying in a price point that is comparable to what clients are expecting these days.
Prices have risen and we’ve had to have those conversations. They’re hard conversations to have with people.
I have previous clients from 10, 15 years ago where maybe they just want to match a product that I made for them and I can no longer do that because of what happened with
COVID and vendors fell off and things like that. But they’ll come to me and go, fine, let’s make a new set. And they’re kind of wildly surprised at how things have changed. We are still the most competitively priced custom workroom in my area.
But at the end of the day, things just aren’t what they were in 2006 to 2013. So making sure that I have a large amount of inventory,
William Hanke (26:57)
Sure.
Lexi Schultz (27:00)
⁓ local suppliers that can build and make the hardware, because the hardware has been the hardest part, honestly, out of all of this.
Manufacturing thousands of little drapery carriers isn’t just something that you can go on the street corner and have somebody do.
So having a vendor and a supplier in the States that keeps them in stock, or not bringing stuff in from overseas or dealing with customs when we can avoid it, has been a huge driver for me to keep costs down, but also make my client happy.
So we’re not waiting months and months for something to get made, drop shipped, and then ultimately stuck in customs for an infinite amount of time.
So really honing on the products that are our top sellers and keeping them here in Austin.
William Hanke (27:36)
Yeah, I’m getting a lot more calls from manufacturers and vendors because they’re suddenly competitive, right? They have the things that you mentioned are causing problems ⁓ and they want to be in front of more dealers, obviously. For listeners that are shifting more sourcing stateside, what advice would you give them?
Lexi Schultz (27:40)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly!
Yeah!
Yeah.
But
to be open to your local radius, like I said, I didn’t realize that we had any kind of manufacturing ability here in the Austin area until I spent time looking and going, wow, these guys did a great job doing the fence for me.
Would you be able to powder code and make all this custom hardware? The short answer is yes. You just got to ask. You’ve got to see if you’ve got local ⁓ contractors or GCs that can build these track systems for you. A lot of them can if they have the right components from the
the manufacturing or the steel manufacturer.
When it comes to sewing, always open your eyes and see if there’s somebody in your local community that might be able to pick up the complexities of drapery because unfortunately, sewing a fabric and drapery is kind of a dying art and we’ll get into that I’m sure in a minute.
But as far as having local people that have generations behind them, putting ads out in your local next door neighbor apps, that’s where I’ve found a lot of really great installers or people that had background in this industry.
But just
weren’t advertising it openly, you know, on LinkedIn and stuff like that. So being able to kind of dive deep into your local probably 15, 20 mile radius doesn’t have to be far.
I know a lot of people aren’t as populated as Austin, but having resources that make sense that are parallels to this industry, you might have somebody that can help pick up a lot of the ⁓ anxiety you’re having about not having to ship stuff from overseas if you can avoid it.
William Hanke (29:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s where my mind was going was the shipping costs. You’re going to save a ton in shipping just by finding local.
Lexi Schultz (29:21)
Yeah. yeah.
Insane, insane amount of shipping. I
get 18 wheelers on here. Just state to state right now is sometimes crazy expensive,
but having shipping from overseas and customs and then tariffs at the bottom end of the day, you’re like, this product cost me $10 a yard. Now we’re up at $45 a yard. I might as well have just picked something that was right here in the States or made in a manufactured mill in the States.
So it is, they’re at the same rate at this point. And now it’s just a matter of opening your eyes and spending the time because what I’ve found with window treatment experts,
⁓
Like myself and other designers is we kind of get in a rut We only want to do what we know and so having to learn something new Midgame after so many years in and going. Okay.
This isn’t working. How do we pivot? Because again, we’re really great at pivoting but
we spend the time to we let the mistakes happen and then Spend the time to find the right direction
if you do that now you’re saving yourself years of pain of just struggling through low profit margins issues freight ⁓
damage that happens all the time. yeah, really just opening up and seeing what’s in your immediate vicinity. You might be surprised.
William Hanke (30:28)
That’s great. I love that. Great advice, too. Thank you for that.
Lexi Schultz (30:32)
I try, I’m trying to make sure everybody
knows that there is a path forward for window treatment experts in the US. You’re not having to rely all over the world if you don’t want to.
William Hanke (30:40)
Yeah, yeah. So you’ve launched something new, Art of Drapery Academy. What inspired that?
Lexi Schultz (30:46)
Yeah.
Well, I think it came from just years of watching.
This is, by the way, this is specific to interior designers. This is my passion project for them because it’s a love letter to drapery being a dying art.
so having it be something that isn’t, isn’t wildly chosen as an industry, you know, it’s, a very niche market these days. A lot of window treatment experts like my mom.
are kind of generationing themselves out. They’re starting to retire. They are not wanting to pick up the torch and keep doing this anymore in a front-facing retail way.
So the academy I built from both sides of the fence when I was in the mail room in the beginning, essentially, scrubbing and cleaning and putting all the fabric books away and really listening in the workroom, like what we can and can’t do with fabric and picking up tips and tricks from her at job sites and watching installers for years.
So having that side educationally, but in addition to that sales side, there’s almost no sales ability these days.
Everybody who just wants it to just work or put it in an online cart. So having the ability to have drapery and sell it is one of the biggest arts that is such a lost art. And so being in retail sales for so long, I’ve got 20 years of experience to tell you why this is going to work, why this isn’t going to work. And I’m trying to really open the eyes to the current designers that are in those
William Hanke (31:47)
Sure.
Lexi Schultz (32:07)
kind of 30 to 50 year old structure that are in their prime and they can pick up another skill that might have otherwise really scared them. So that’s my passion project. We’ve been kind of soft launching it and we’ve got some, we’ve got our Instagram up right now and we’re starting to kind of collect names and build courses and classes. There’s some freebies on our site right now, but overall it’s just one of those things where I want to make sure I’m hitting the right market because it’s only for designers. The retail public doesn’t need to care about those unless you want to go into the window treatment industry. But making sure that
William Hanke (32:25)
Okay.
Lexi Schultz (32:36)
this art of how draperies get made correctly and how to sell that there’s a platform to have a designer go,
this feels easy, this girl can teach me something that I otherwise would never have picked up. But it’s profitable, it’s something you can do, and it’s an easy extension of your current design brand is what I’m really trying to get across to everybody.
William Hanke (32:55)
That’s great. We’ll make sure to link below on the show notes, links to all this stuff that you’re building for sure.
Lexi Schultz (32:59)
Yeah,
William Hanke (33:02)
What gaps are you seeing in designer education right now?
Lexi Schultz (33:07)
The gap is massive. It’s almost like a void at this point
because designers are one of two animals and I love working with everybody from the design industry, but I found that you’re either you’ve been in it for a long time, perhaps you have all your certifications, you’ve gone to college,
but this amount of drapery knowledge wasn’t taught necessarily at the college level. So this was the ⁓ build it as you go type experience where a lot of designers struggle with it. They just let their workroom rely on them and let them make the decisions.
but didn’t know that there was an opportunity for them to have a voice in their own drapery designs. So I found that kind of more of the classic to traditional design ⁓ way of going about it. You went to college, but perhaps weren’t taught drapery, and then you just kind of went along the way. You found a vendor and you latched on, and that’s who you use. And that’s great. That’s fine. But it doesn’t necessarily leave you a lot of options on expanding your radius on drapery.
Then you’ve got the designers over here that are the self-taught ones. There are so many these days, and they are in
incredibly talented and these are the ones that we see more and more on Instagram or with their own TV shows and things like that where they’re not classically trained
William Hanke (34:11)
So.
Lexi Schultz (34:14)
but they absolutely have the eye, the style and then the marketing behind them to be able to get in front of the right audience.
William Hanke (34:14)
You
Lexi Schultz (34:20)
Drapery to them is the scariest thing on the planet because it’s a high value, expensive, essentially mistake if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So having these two paths of designers, everybody’s welcome when it comes to our academy.
And in addition to that, great curtain company, Brand, we support designers with
a VIP trade program where if they really truly just don’t want to do any of it, they want to keep doing their thing, which is tile and paint and chandeliers and rugs and all of that, go for it. But let me be your girl to come in and help you and make sure that you’re getting your draperies the way that you want them, that they’re going to follow through on your vision. So having an option of you want to learn, we’re going to have that academy for you. But if you are necessarily wanting to go that route, you want to have it just look the way you want it to.
I’ll be happy to step in and actually be your concierge and your voice for draperies.
William Hanke (35:08)
So for those that want to learn, what kind of topics are you teaching and how are you structuring the courses?
Lexi Schultz (35:10)
Yeah.
Yeah, so a lot of the topics are circled around, especially the most recent ones we’ve started on. I’ve got some free downloads on the site right now.
We have a course called Linen Logic, which is probably about 30, 45 minutes of me really showing examples of different linens and how to embrace blends versus just leaning into the fact that, 100 % linen is the way to go. There’s a lot of good and bad that goes with a lot of different textures. And if you don’t know the nuances of how it’s going to hang or how it’s going to pleat,
a lot of times your project’s gonna end up a huge expensive fail. So I’m trying to kind of hit the bullet points of how do we make sure you’re selecting fabric for the right client? If this client has the right home for this style of fabric and how does it get applied to drapery? So a lot of courses and just tips and tricks with how to make sure you’re selecting the fabric initially at the right phase for the right application.
William Hanke (35:47)
Okay.
Lexi Schultz (36:03)
But I also, like I said, building my sales course right now.
We’re having a master class. We’re hopefully going to launch later this year. I’ve got a wait list right now as we’re building all of the content right now. having the ability to sit down and go, no, I want to learn how to sell this and I want to be a rock star at it and I want to increase my profit levels. There’s a whole second part of the site if you’re looking for that, not just tips and tricks.
William Hanke (36:11)
⁓ good.
Yeah, what platform did you do this on?
Lexi Schultz (36:27)
This one was built on Shopify, actually. Yes. Yeah. I found it to be fairly easy.
William Hanke (36:30)
Okay, cool.
Lexi Schultz (36:33)
And it’s one of those things where with such a developed background in graphics that I’m able to do it and manage it myself and not fully rely at this time on a secondary web developer or anybody who has to manage it. Once it gets bigger, I’m sure I’m going to be like, let’s have somebody help us just for the logistics part of it.
But being able to see my concept and put it together, Shopify was really easy to work with for this.
William Hanke (36:56)
Okay, interesting. What’s been the biggest challenge in getting that off the ground?
Lexi Schultz (36:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
So it’s been really a combination of things. I didn’t realize when I have this, I’ve had this idea for so long and putting it together and executing it, had professional videography,
we had professional photography, we used our showroom as basically the commercial for this entire academy and the knowledge courses that are gonna go with it.
And to also show off our concierge services, how we go about our process, how we select it. So building all of the content, I guess I was.
in over my head as far as wanting to make sure that we had enough video, enough professional photography to make it feel like you’re standing here in our studio with me right now. ⁓ So that was the biggest stumbling block where I’m like, have the idea. I know what structure I want. I know what I want to teach. But how do I make it feel engaging and like you’re actually here and you’re not just watching some boring course online? Yeah.
William Hanke (37:39)
I love it.
Right.
Do you think education is a growth opportunity that more window treatment pros should explore?
Lexi Schultz (37:59)
I do,
I truly do. And I help more people see the profitability in it. When you start off in your own entrepreneurial business, you’re not sure how it’s gonna go. You definitely believe in it enough because if you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t stop. You just keep building and you keep going. So that’s what we’ve done since 2006.
But having someone stop and go, we need to grow this industry and…
I need to be able to be a voice or an extension or a hand, a olive branch essentially to reach out and find a new generation that wants to be a part of this industry. That’s what my real hope is here because I’m not seeing, you know, 30 something, 40 something designers anymore that are wanting to learn a new skill like this or going one step further, the sewing element.
Our workrooms have so many beautiful, wonderful seamstresses in them, but they are, unfortunately, their bodies are aging out. And so they’re not able to sew those 20-width pairs or two-story ripple fold draperies the way that they used to or at the speed they used to because humans are still involved. And so having the growth opportunity in our industry, I would love to see more younger generation wanting to develop a trade, learning the sewing element, the production element, the building element.
I’d love to see more people getting involved in that trade because it is highly lucrative and highly profitable because there’s such a need for it around the US.
But in addition to that, having designers grow their current ⁓ bottom lines and ROIs based on the fact that they’re just adding one more skill set that they can charge hourly, they can do markup on, they get with the right workroom, they’re gonna crank out draperies every time if they can market it correctly and get it positioned in front of their clients.
So growth in the sales form when it comes to the designer, but also
I would love to see a huge growth in the explosion of a younger generation taking over the workforce that’s producing all these beautiful products behind us.
William Hanke (39:50)
Yeah, now a lot of the younger generation is doing what you didn’t do and going into graphic design, right? That’s a big one. ⁓
Lexi Schultz (39:56)
They are, they are, absolutely. that’s gonna
get them very far too. need, there’s a huge need for that as well. And these products don’t sell themselves. You’ve gotta have that type of archetype to be able to do both. know, be in design, but also be in graphics. So that’s awesome.
William Hanke (40:11)
Yeah,
yeah, how has your graphics design background helped you as a business owner?
Lexi Schultz (40:18)
think it’s helped me be able to visualize with my clients and show them what the finished product is going to look like.
So before the advent of AI, we relied solely on full length, drapery panels and being able to hold it up and just use my natural ability to create a world for them verbally, how this is going to pleat, how this is going to
hang. Knowing in my head what it’s going to end up looking like on their window was something that only lived here for so long until recently, once we had all these developments with ChapGBT.
William Hanke (40:42)
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (40:46)
and the ability to pop out a rendering within seconds, I can now, with so many years of knowing what I want to say to my client,
give this into the prompt, put the window in it, and get fairly close to generally what the space is going to look like. So this has been a huge tool for me to finally be able to use because I was just relying solely on my natural ability to tell people, OK, here’s how it’s going to look. We would do a lot of sketch artistry. We would do a lot of drawing.
We would do.
composite images, if it was a really complex project, that’s where we bring back the Photoshop skills and I was physically doing it myself.
But now, having this graphic design background has made marketing a lot easier for me, it’s made my content a lot easier to share and keep it cohesive with my brand. But on top of that, showing the client ultimately what the finished product’s gonna look like has been just exponentially easier these days.
So yeah, having that as the first part of my brain and now being able to apply it to design has been wonderful.
William Hanke (41:35)
Yeah.
That’s great. And you mentioned jumping into AI early. ⁓ Tell me what is your favorite platform, LLM, to use? What is your best case scenario for that?
Lexi Schultz (41:51)
Yeah, so I’m currently still a chat GPT girl. However, I’ve been able to manipulate it the way that I need to to be able to get my drapery logic in there and make sure that we have all of the steps and the right kind of rendering that I’m gonna want.
Uploaded plenty of example images of how I want my final product to look like and then I can use my ability to explain how the fabric hangs, what the repeats are and things like that to end up with a beautiful product to show my clients. So the AI element when it comes to visuals has been really helpful.
But in addition to that, just keeping the messaging on target. Being able to do audits of my own website and make sure that the content feels like our brand or like my voice. I don’t just use it and let it spit it out and just print whatever it comes up with.
I spend a lot of time inputting information and making sure it understands our tone and how our style is and make sure that we don’t start drifting and looking like somebody else. it’s been a…
Couple years of really honing in to make sure that when I open the app and I wanted to do something, I’m not having to have it remember everything every five seconds. giving examples, spending a lot of time with it and making sure that it knows your brand fully before you even produce one image or even before you produce one bit of content is real important. Don’t just rely on AI to say, hey, I want to know what black and white drapes look like in my office.
William Hanke (42:54)
Great.
Lexi Schultz (43:09)
OK, it’s going to come up with something for sure. That’s its goal. But.
William Hanke (43:09)
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (43:13)
Having the ability to rein it in is a totally different
animal. And so that’s what I really enjoyed. I know there are so many better rendering programs out there. I think it’s because I have the showroom still. I’m still a brick and mortar that I still really rely on the ⁓ old school way of sales and holding up the fabrics and stuff. And then I moved to rendering when we hit an impasse where I really got to show somebody something. So I use it, but as a support, not a crutch. It is not what I’m building the brand around.
William Hanke (43:33)
Yeah.
Yeah, but I love that you’re jumping in head first into that world.
Lexi Schultz (43:42)
Oh yeah, had
to. mean, there was something that it’s like a person who’s been in graphic design and my mom has been doing marketing even before she was doing design. She and I were like, this is incredible. Can we just play around on this? We would just have nights where we would just ask it questions and see what it could come up with. What is it capable of? And it’s a lot, but as long as you’re using it, like I said, as a tool and not as a absolute substitute for sales or being able to have human interaction or be able to have
still the tactile environment to walk into, this industry can be irreplaceable if we make it.
William Hanke (44:16)
Great. Yeah. Let’s talk marketing. What channels or tools are delivering results for you right now?
Lexi Schultz (44:23)
Yeah. So when we first started in 2006 to 2013, we relied really heavy.
Once PPC, per click, came into the mix, that’s where we spent almost all of our investment. It went from magazines and then it moved very quickly from Austin American Statesman and print advertising, which was crazy expensive at the time, to then moving into Google and pay per click and then SEO. And we started with a very modest budget. And then as everybody got into it, the budget started getting bigger and bigger, but it was still paying off for us.
Again, specific to the last probably two years, I’ve seen a huge differential in how PPC works, at least in my industry or on my brand. PPC is now just a support. It is almost like a billboard or the yellow pages. It is definitely not something where I’m going to click it and this is my absolute authoritative selection anymore. It’s now we have to spend a lot of time with SEO management, updating our website, having content rich posts on Instagram. We do a lot of
cross promotion with other designers and making sure that we’re doing collaborations with them. I’ve got a few independent designers that we have an exclusive fabric line with. And so having this kind of cross communication, working with people in my industry that are on my level of sales and what they’re trying to do ⁓ brand wise, but then spending a lot of time making sure that all of our words and text and text and verbiage meets what I’m trying to say and hit the right marketing. I spent a lot of time on Instagram.
Our site has a very developed backend and it’s one that we keep up regularly. I have a monthly meeting scheduled tomorrow with our team to be able to review where we are with PPC and SEO. But if you don’t keep these things updated, it’s specific to SEO. That’s where AI is starting to pull a lot of its information from these days. So if you’ve got a beautiful site and a beautiful portfolio with maybe like less than a thousand words on your whole site, you’re not going to get discovered.
William Hanke (45:49)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (46:13)
AI is not going to see you as a brand authoritative.
or someone that can actually give the right answers. So we’ve spent a lot of time making sure that our site is content rich. It has the right answers. It’s not just bloated with a bunch of whatever. It has ⁓ a lot of information on it. It has a lot of high level, hey, this is what you can do with this window. Here’s an entire idea gallery of arch windows. So making sure that you have a brand that is rich enough for people to be discovered organically in addition to through AI search has been the new way of doing it.
But I’m a very, ⁓
Again, graphic girl. love Instagram. I spend a lot of time on there. I love doing stories. I like doing ads. I like doing all of it to be able to see where my market is.
William Hanke (46:56)
Yeah, that’s the dream, right? Having all these different pieces all working together, and especially pay-per-click being a supplement and not like the main all your eggs in one basket kind of thing.
Lexi Schultz (47:08)
It used to be, I’m not going to lie,
there was a point where we were spending upwards of 6 or 7K a month just on PPC, probably between 2010 and 2018. But then when we started to see just ⁓ more competitors in our area and then other competitors just spending twice as much. And I’m like, well, I can’t chase that. I need to drill down and really find my marketplace because if it’s a blanketed approach, it’s not going to work anymore. So that’s what I got really excited when we did start seeing such an uptick in organic. And these numbers we can see on our regular dashboard every
It wasn’t something that all of a sudden was like, ⁓ we need to start thinking about this. It was like, no, half of your, more than half of your visits and your clicks are coming from SEO and just you speaking organically on your blog posts or doing things like this. And then cross communicating and cross promoting between designers that I do installations for on Instagram and things like that. So it’s, it is a symbiotic relationship, but you got to use all of it.
William Hanke (47:58)
Yeah. Yeah,
we call it omnipresence, right? And being on all these different platforms, and there are different levels of visibility to customers. no customer sees you in one spot and engages. That just doesn’t happen, right? They see multiple questions.
Lexi Schultz (48:08)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Yeah, I agree completely. And again,
it’s changed wildly. I’m sure you know that too, Will.
So when you see everything these days on the the data sheet that you pass to a client, you’re kind of like, these numbers look different than they used to. We need to start focusing more here. Here’s where your market’s going. Here’s what’s clicking. Here’s what’s not. So we spend a lot of time making sure that we follow up on what’s working and what’s not and just getting rid of what doesn’t.
William Hanke (48:37)
So as a business owner, you’re in the trenches running this thing. If somebody similar to you wanted to improve their online visibility today, where do you think they should start?
Lexi Schultz (48:50)
think in the window treatment industry, focusing heavily on visuals would be probably where I would start because people don’t reach out until they can make a decision on what it’s going to look like.
so using those platforms like Instagram to be able to show your work or if you’re not ready to show your work yet, embracing AI to be able to create a tool to show rooms or get inspirations going, having something that allows a client to see what is possible instead of just a bunch of,
random stock images from your vendor of fabrics. That’s not going to sell anything.
People in the window treatment industry, we go on these sites because we want to see window treatments. We don’t want to hear 50 different ways to reach out to you. We want to see the finished product before we’ll even contact you. So I feel like if someone’s starting out, obviously stay in it.
Don’t give up because it is a big red ocean out there, as they say, for you to swim into when it comes to online marketing. But if you stay the course and you’re really passionate about
what you’re wanting to present or what you want your brand to look like,
whether it’s maximalist, minimalist, whatever. Just stay the course, stay consistent and make sure that you’re only focusing your energies on your audience. If you try and capture everybody, you’re gonna lose. So having yourself be present visually, getting your photos into Google and organic search right away, just so people can start knowing with meta tags and backend tagging what these things can look like and then lead them back to you.
I start with the visuals, know, and starting to build a couple of good clients that trust your vision, ⁓ maybe even going in and doing it at your cost to begin with a few times just to get it photographed, just to get it on your portfolio. Really, it’s going to take some hours. It’s going to take some money.
But once you get it going, you’re going to look the part. You’re going to look like you can actually walk in and someone’s going to feel comfortable giving you tens of thousands of dollars to do window treatments if you don’t have something to show for it. And it’s just a bunch of reach out here, forms here, maybe a stock image here and there.
William Hanke (50:28)
Thank
Lexi Schultz (50:42)
that might not get you across the finish line these days.
William Hanke (50:44)
Yeah,
yeah. As a company that builds websites for window treatment companies, the gallery section is always highly trafficked because people want to look at, they want to imagine. Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (50:55)
my God, it’s like our number one for us too. It’s like, yeah,
I agree. And it’s so important to fill that with your work or inspiration work that you have that you’ve associated with, anything you can do to start showing the finished product. Because once people see what’s possible, then they’re more apt to go, I can reach out. I understand now that this can be done on my window. Yeah.
William Hanke (51:16)
Yeah, it’s funny because gallery pages tend to not rank very well, right? They had to be exposed to you some other way, so all that other stuff matters. But that’s really their main goal is to start looking at what, my home can look like this. ⁓ you know, that’s pretty awesome.
Lexi Schultz (51:23)
Exactly.
Yeah, it’s like opening a magazine these days. know, when you’re standing at the line, we have HEB here in Texas. So when you’re like standing in the line with your groceries and you see a Veranda magazine or you see a Texas Home and Living and you pick it up and you start flipping and you’re like, wow, look at all these cool window treatments or look at all these beautiful upholstery pieces. It makes you want to buy it. It makes you want to learn more.
So if you can apply that logic to your site, people are definitely going to feel more comfortable clicking and reaching out.
William Hanke (51:55)
Yeah, cool. So let’s do a couple bonus questions here. You ready? ⁓
Lexi Schultz (51:58)
Work!
William Hanke (52:00)
What is a tool or trick that you swear by that more people should start using?
Lexi Schultz (52:07)
think if it’s going to be a tool, it’s probably going to be being in touch and being a human with the process. We touched on it a little bit before about how AI is a great tool to bring in. That’s obvious. I can use that tool all day long.
But to still have human connection, to still show up for your client, whether it be on install day, if that’s the type of business model that you run, or at least doing the house call or having them come back to whatever space that represents you and where you want to show them.
making someone feel like you heard them and listened to them and that you spent time on their project and it wasn’t just a number and a queue, that’s the most important tip or trick or tool I can possibly tell because everything is going to get kind of absorbed by AI. Automatic emails are going to be starting to be sent. Voices are going to change on how people send. I’m highly uncomfortable sending an email unless I know that it sounds like me.
I just feel like, my God, this is no longer my brand if I can’t really hone in on it and I won’t send it until it does.
If you just hit click, yes, this sounds good, do this, you’re losing the human interaction. So not losing the ability to like sit down and hear your client’s needs and hear that they said at least several times that they have a lot of sun in this room. That means they’re going to want to close the draperies. Don’t go and sell them a mock valence or a mock Roman shade. They’re going to call you and go, why did you sell me this? This isn’t what I asked for. I said, I have sun that’s roasting me while I’m watching football on Sunday.
So listening and just picking up on what clients are saying and having a relationship with them so that they know they can trust you, but also that you heard them and that the product they’re getting is actually what they’re getting. That’s the most important tip and trick I can give.
William Hanke (53:41)
I like that. I like that. What’s a trend that you think is going to reshape the industry in the next two to three years?
Lexi Schultz (53:51)
If it’s a trend when it comes to fabric and things like that, I’m really excited about where the industry is going. I can open a magazine these days and see more maximalist design. And I’m like, yes, we’re starting to bring back silk fabrics and some more avant-garde looking things and top treatments are coming back. So if it’s a trend aspect, I’m pretty excited to see all of those more maximalist fabrics in use again. They’re not for everybody, but it’s certainly the way I like to design. ⁓ If it’s a trend when it comes to
The marketplace as a whole, definitely the trend of AI kind of coming in and selecting who’s going to be shown for advertising purposes. Because without that SEO support and all of the good things you need to be doing with your website, soon people will just be asking Chad GPT, hey, who do you trust for draperies in my area, in my zip code? And that’s it. If you’re not on that list, you’re done. So having the ability to have the amount of years behind you, like we do.
the support structure and the star rating and the clientele to support the authoritative selection of an AI figure to be able to select and give you the best recommendation. I think that that’s gonna be a huge shifter for what you do, Will, and then also for what I do, to getting shown in front of people.
William Hanke (54:56)
Yeah.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve already got clients that are getting recommended by chat GPT.
Lexi Schultz (55:04)
We are too. The other day I had somebody
tell me that I’m like, that is so cool. my gosh, I love this. ⁓
William Hanke (55:10)
Yeah, pretty cool. But it speaks back to the fact that you’ve built this foundation. It’s not like you just just didn’t
Lexi Schultz (55:15)
Yeah, I didn’t just show up. Absolutely not. And
so I think that’s part of it too, is the amount of years we’ve been on Google,
the amount of work and updates clearly our site has taken on, ⁓ and just the amount of time and relationships that we’ve had in the Austin area. I sure miss physical marketing. I always have a dream of going back into doing magazine, but I’m like, it’s so expensive. But I would absolutely love to open my magazine that I subscribe to and be like,
There’s us, just to say it, you know what I mean?
William Hanke (55:45)
That’s great. Yeah. Yeah. Lexi, thank you so much for all the things that you’ve shared today. I really do appreciate it. ⁓ Yeah, cool. Yeah, it’s been fun. Where can people learn more about you, the showroom, and the Art of Drapery Academy?
Lexi Schultz (55:51)
Absolutely, this was such a joy.
Sure, so if you want to learn more, if you’re a retail client listening and you’re just kind of understand what’s out there in the drapery marketplace,
our retail showroom is The Great Curtain Company and our website is austincurtains.com. That’s where you can find all of our products and see our galleries and see our work and see me and our showroom. We’ve got a whole video of our showroom up there. But if you’re a designer and you’re looking for a workroom, I am happy to tell you that we offer that as well. Same site, austincurtains.com. You can drop it down to the ⁓ trade and trade partners page.
and be able to fill out a form to get a trade application sent to us and we can get you all set up. We’re happy to help and support your projects. But the Art of Drapery is just artofdraperyacademy.com. You can also find us on Instagram and that’s where we’re gonna be launching all of our new courses, ideas, and we’ve got something really special and planned for spring coming up right
William Hanke (56:48)
Listen to you. You knocked it out. This is fantastic. Cool. Well, thank you again. I really do appreciate your time.
Lexi Schultz (56:51)
Thanks guys, this was so much fun. ⁓
Thank you all.
William Hanke (56:57)
Yeah.
Lexi Schultz (56:59)
a good day.
William Hanke (56:59)
So that’s
a wrap for today’s episode of Marketing Panes. Big thanks to Lexi Schultz for sharing her journey, her passion for American made and her mission to help designers level up. If something in this episode sparked an idea for your business, share it with a friend in the trade and make sure to follow us on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you listen. We’ve got more expert conversations just like this coming soon.
And if you’re thinking about how to align your marketing with your message, we hope this episode gave you a roadmap.
