Today in The Lounge, Nick hosts a special interview with Angela Schuster, who has extensive expertise in both the interior design and paint contracting industries. Based in Northern New Jersey, Angela’s decorative finishing and painting business, Faux Time Design, serves a variety of clients in the greater New York City area. Through her collaboration with various interior designers and general painting contractors, Angela emphasizes the importance of effectively marketing one’s business.

A Career Change

With a degree in marketing under her belt, Angela originally began a career in corporate planning and sales. It was not until a decorative artist gave her a quote on a mural for her newborn son’s nursery that she found an interest in design. She found it too expensive and decided to tackle it herself. Angela later returned to school for art and design where she studied under some of the leading names in the decorative finishing industry including Gary Lord and Melanie Royals. In 2005, she launched her company Faux Time Design.

Marketing is Everything

Using her marketing background, Angela developed a business plan for her new startup. This included an intensive email marketing and social media campaign. In addition, there are two marketing actions made by Angela that she believes were “instrumental in making [her] company what it is today.” The first is that she hosts annual art gallery-style open houses at local hotels in conference/banquet areas, in which she arranges her decorative finishes on easels. She invites designers, contractors, builders, and clients, and talks about up-and-coming trends and concepts in the field. Angela says that it isn’t uncommon to book four to six months worth of work from these events.

Taking Your Design Business to the Next Level with Showhouses

The second avenue of marketing that helped dramatically grow Angela’s business was her use of showhouses. These are special houses typically sponsored by nonprofit groups that showcase the exclusive designs of interior designers and decorators who each design a room in the house. Although designing a space in a showhome is a several week-long time commitment of from set ups to follow ups, Angela testifies that these events are huge marketing tools for designers to discuss designs with potential clients. She highly recommends that designers look into booking showhouses early on and reach out to the designers featured the previous year.

Angela shows how imperative effective marketing is, especially when growing a young design business. Whether that means digital marketing, showhouses, or word of mouth, she advises designers to never pass up an opportunity to market and advertise their design business.

Learn more about Angela Schuster at www.fauxtimedesign.com.