I love designing, I love color, I love fabric and pattern and texture. I love making people's homes beautiful. And I love working with clients. I get a lot of emails from young people asking about what it takes to be a designer. How much of it is design and what other skills are necessary.
Impeccable taste, and excellent design sense is just the beginning. You need people skills, too. After all you work with a wide range of people from contractors to fine crafts people to delivery people, to drapery workrooms, to clients, to architects. You need project management and problem-solving skills. A head for business and creating systems to handle all the details of ordering custom items helps. You have to know how to specify custom a huge variety of products from window treatments to custom upholstery to wall-to-wall carpet.
And one of the most important skills you need is you have to be able to fix problems. You have to be set up for taking care of your clients. You have to know how to go about doing that, and every situation presents itself differently in terms of what has to be fixed. That’s a skill you can’t really teach. You just have to figure it out.
Last year, a set of chairs were sent to Michigan instead of Massachusetts because a worker at the factory placed the chairs on the wrong truck. That was a first for me, but we eventually figured it out and were able to rectify it. Of course the client had to wait about a week for the truck to arrive for pick up in Michigan and about a week for the chairs to arrive here, but we got them to her, eventually.
