How To Market Yourself As An Interior Designer

Learning how to market yourself as an interior designer isn’t that easy.

Anyway, I know I’m not the only one who feels like for years that I’ve been pushed into a box of being a socially awkward turd.

I’ve tried for many years to hide parts of myself from the world because let’s face it. No one wants to be the person that others can easily pick out of a crowd as the odd one.

And I’m betting you’ve done the same. I mean, come on, with the pressure in the design industry to look like a polished prima donna, who hasn’t shed parts of their identity to fit in with the “cool crowd?”

The sad part is while so many of us have shed the parts of us that make us unique in search of the gold at the end of the rainbow, we’ve unwittingly become a part of the problem.

The design industry is filled with posers, unrealistic clients and fake expectations of what design should really be about.

While here the rest of us, talented, competent and nice people who want to serve others with our gifts and also market yourself as an interior designer yet, in our efforts to play the game of marketing our business we find ourselves diving down the most uninspired and icky rabbit holes trying to stand out. And that entire time? The only marketing plan we ever needed was right in front of our faces.

Rather, in the stars.

Yeah science, bitch!

Okay, astrology may not be accepted science. Hell, vibrational medicine isn’t even considered real science at this point, but we’re going to ignore that because when there are enough synchronicities I’m just not going to discount that shit.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was this dude named Carl Jung. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst which involves a bit of science, right?

So this guy is considered the big daddy of analytical psychology. I’m sure they didn’t call him big daddy to his face, but maybe behind closed doors?

Anyway, he believed that astrology could give us insight into the human mind. He’d get information on his client’s natal charts and then would align them with his archetypes.

The Jungian Archetypes were based on the types of people in the world. Kind of like that saying that by Shakespeare: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Jung took that idea and believed that with these archetypes we could instantly recognize the role that person plays in the world. 

When you know what your primary archetype is you will not have all of those annoying questions when you market yourself as an interior designer.

You’ve seen archetypes in stories, novels, the tarot, and myths. For instance, the Regular Person is like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz is the Innocent. James Dean is the Outlaw in Rebel Without A Cause. They have a story that you can pick out and once you understand what your personal archetype is, you can incorporate that into your business persona without worrying about those stupid brand pants ever again.

Archetypes are also tied to the 12 signs in the Zodiac which gets me most excited. You know why? If you do any sort of digging or a quiz on trying to find your archetype, you’ll probably be matched with something that sorta resonates with you, but not totally. At least that was how it was for me.

They Said I Was A Creator

I started researching this connection between archetypes and zodiac signs which led me to be confused and pissed off. There had to be a correlation that made sense and it wasn’t coming from some armchair expert who is just reposting shitty memes online.

And that’s when I fell down a rabbit hole for four months. Yes, four fucking months I have been working on this. I seriously didn’t intend to work on this because I’ve got a lot of other cool stuff I want to share with you, but when your soul grabs a hold of a bone, you’ve got to see it through.

So, I took a couple of quizzes that were supposed to tell me what my primary brand archetype was and I got two. Creator and Sage.

A creator, while some aspects do apply to me, it doesn’t fit me perfectly. And while all of us can identify with different parts of the archetypes out there, this one doesn’t feel perfect and why integrate something that doesn’t fit?

Here’s where I think the problem lies within the archetype quizzes… you might be feeling one way when you take a quiz and the next time you take the quiz you are feeling another part of yourself and end up with another archetype. And that simply doesn’t work for me.

However, the Sage archetype did resonate with me, but not as my primary archetype. The Sage archetype loves to do research and obviously, that is the part of me that led me down this four-month research project.

The Sage will dig deep and wants to help others understand what the Sage has learned. And here we are. This is what most of my business has been about.

I’ve done the research for years and brought my findings and strategies to the members of the Society for years. It’s not in my nature to regurgitate information that I’ve heard from others because, as a Sage, I fear being wrong. And all of that information is a part of the Sage archetype.

But I Had To Find The Truth

Because the Creator archetype didn’t fit me, I knew there had to be something I was missing. The day before I found the answers, I had an astrological meeting with Mercedes (if you want her 411, just let me know) and within that meeting, I confirmed that my research was correct. And then I finally felt like I could wrap this project up.

You see, the interesting thing in my chart was the Pisces part that I have been hiding for years. Only those closest to me knew about that part of me and I hid it from the designer community because… hello? They’d thrown my woo-woo ass out quicker than Kyle Richards gets kicked out of Vanderpump’s house.

Pisces is the Magician and do you know what that archetype is about? Alchemy, intuition, vision, mysticism, spiritualism, and transformation. And what have I been recently talking about when it comes to the business of interior design? All of that.

But I didn’t start out embracing the Magician archetype and inadvertently chose the Outlaw archetype for my business. While the Outlaw seeks to inspire radical change and do things differently, I think it was the only way I felt safe in not fitting in with the design community that, at times, pisses me the fuck off. This would lead me to cross the line at times in my posts, but I don’t regret anything and at times still feel like it’s a part of my personality that I will embrace.

What About You?

Enough about me, what about you? Are you struggling to figure out the true personality of your business?

It’s taken me 9 years to feel comfortable with who I am and also to share it with the world and I know I don’t want it to take you this long to fully embody who you are in your business.

Beyond, just feeling in alignment with who I truly am, I now can express the emotions that I share with my ideal clients. And by doing that I am also pushing away those that would end up being nightmare clients for me.

If you are, I’m inviting you to join me in my new course Astro Brand Alchemy that will help you to market yourself as an interior designer without stressing anymore about all the strategies. Can I get an amen? 

And what I think is the best part of this new course, is that I discovered that for you, depending on who your ideal client is - there are certain types of design services that they are really going to love which helps you to skip a lot of the trial and error period many of us go through when trying to create the perfect services to help our clients.

But beyond all of that… what 3D people refuse to talk about when it comes to figuring out how to market yourself as an interior designer is that clients choose to work with people they have an emotional connection with. And if you listen to those people, you’ll continue to struggle to attract clients if you’re basing your marketing on the features and benefits alone of your services.

So, that’s where we’re at. We’re starting down the path to creating businesses that resonate with who we are and our gifts. And I think we can agree that life is too short to market a business that isn’t in complete alignment with our souls.

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