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How to Reach Out to Interior Designers (So She Actually Remembers You)
The lesson a piece of ribbon taught me about becoming someone's go-to artist.
When I was 26 and building The Scouted Studio and The Art Coaching Club into what they are today, I worked as an assistant for Courtney Brown, the interior designer behind Courtney Agosti Interior Design. She was, and still is, an incredible mentor and friend, and I could fill your whole day with stories about our time together. Today I want to share just one, a small memory she probably doesn't even remember, but one that changed how I think about working with designers for good.
Courtney had this beautiful studio, a renovated house in downtown Charleston, where vendors would stop by from time to time with new fabric swatches or other goodies. One afternoon, two women came in to show us their new, small fabric line. We oohed and aahed over the samples, but what really left a mark was the packaging. Each pack of fabric was bound up like a high-end wedding invitation.
After they left, Courtney tacked a piece of the ribbon from that packaging onto her moodboard. "We need to find a project where we can use this," she said.
Probably once a week after that, we'd both glance at the moodboard and say the same line. We need to find a project where we can use this.
That vendor won a future job by making herself and her product memorable, and that's something I've kept thinking about since, because it points to something most general advice on how to reach out to interior designers misses entirely.
Designers aren't scrolling and scrolling on Instagram waiting to discover you, so stop stressing so much about that platform. They're reaching for the artist who comes to mind first for the project in front of them. Just like they have their go-to fabric house and their go-to antique store, you need to become their go-to artist. If your work fits their style, trust me, you can be.
Think about her day for a second. The average interior designer is juggling multiple projects at once. Each one has a client with opinions, a contractor with deadlines, a builder running late, and forty-plus vendors in the mix. Her inbox probably has thousands of unread emails. She is not curating art like a museum director, though I'm sure some days she wishes she were. She's running an operation that assumes nobody misses a deadline.
If you can make yourself memorable, you become the name she reaches for instead of one of the thousands on her Instagram feed.
How to Reach Out to Interior Designers the Right Way
The first step is introducing yourself, and I don't recommend showing up at someone's studio unannounced, so let's start with an email. Your introduction should come with a trade portfolio: a document that shows who you are, what you make, how you work, and what your trade program looks like, in under three minutes of skimming. Most artists I talk to don't have one. Building yours is step one in standing out.
Below, I'm walking you through exactly how to reach out to interior designers: how to find the right ones for your work, who to contact at each firm, what belongs inside that PDF, a few bonus ways to be memorable, and the exact outreach template I used to land three new designer relationships last month.
If you've been meaning to work with designers and haven't known where to start, or you started and it stalled, this one's for you.
If you've been meaning to work with designers and haven't known where to start, or you started and it stalled, this one's for you.
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