Dear Dakota | The Best Form of Additional Income for Interior Designers
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Updated April 2023
DESIGNER SUBMITTED QUESTION
“Outside of direct services, what is the best form of additional income for interior designers? What avenue is the most profitable and worth pursuing for a company with three employees?
Furniture sales? Passive income downloads? Courses? Affiliate income?”
My Advice to Interior Designers:
The answer lies in people and physical products, not digital products or affiliate income, at least as a first step in generating additional income as an interior designer.
The key with any income stream is to create what your people are asking for; fill a need they already have.
For most interior designers, this does NOT mean (at least not as a first step) creating a course or a digital product. This often means examining the clients you are currently working with and determining how to increase revenue on each project and decrease expenses.
I'm not saying "just charge them more" (nope, nope, nope), but instead, identify if they have other needs you can meet by offering an additional service or selling products.
The thing with passive income products, like courses and digital downloads, is that you need to have a large audience and a way to consistently bring new people to your website.
More traffic to your site = more eyes on your offers = higher chance of sales.
You also have to remember, this is likely a NEW audience from the one you are already marketing to (so you’ll have to have a marketing and attraction plan for i) your interior design services (clients who want DONE-FOR-YOU services) and ii) your digital product customers (clients who want to DIY it).
This is why the easiest first step for interior designers in creating additional revenue streams (before building an audience, writing blog posts, leveraging Pinterest and Google My Business to bring traffic to your site, improving your SEO, building an email list, consistently sending emails to your list, etc.) is to focus on serving your existing clients in more ways.
Before creating anything new ever, you always want to make sure you’ve leveraged and optimized your existing revenue streams as much as possible.
How do you do this?
Make sure your processes are efficient and streamlined (here’s how to do that).
Make sure your marketing is bringing in the right people on autopilot (here’s how to do that).
Because once you're providing clients with your professional design services, the natural next step is to source products that are to-the-trade so you can sell them to your already engaged clients to increase the value of that project.
You’ll then transition from having just one revenue stream (professional services) to two revenue streams (professional services + product sales).
If you aren't already selling furniture:
Join a buying group, use Side Door, and/or open up a few trade accounts and become familiar with those lines so you can sell them to your clients.
Be sure to grab our on-demand training, Beyond Retail, to learn the ins and outs of how to price and sell to-the-trade furnishings.
If you are already selling furniture:
If you're already selling furniture and generating revenue from it, the next step would be to hire and train someone to manage the entire purchasing process to remove you from it.
From creating purchase orders, submitting them to vendors, and making payments, to tracking acknowledgments, approving CFAs, checking order status, updating the client, coordinating with the receiver, scheduling deliveries, and handling claims, a qualified purchasing coordinator (or whatever you want to call it), will give you back so much time so you can focus on revenue-generating tasks (more on what those are here).
You design.
The client approves and pays.
Your purchasing coordinator sees the payment and approval come through.
They take it from there.
So yes, there will still be work for you to source the products, provide revisions, and then, during the order management phase, if you need to reselect fabrics or items that have been backordered or discontinued, etc. But you will be freed up to start working on your next design project rather than having to dedicate time to placing the orders and following up with vendors to ensure everything has been received. If this person takes on 10-15 hours a week of order management and handles hundreds of thousands in orders for your company each year, talk about a high return on your investment in hiring for that role.
In short, if you want additional income streams, selling furniture to your existing clients is the first no-brainer solution. Then, removing yourself from the ordering process and hiring someone to manage your product sales is the next step. This way, you are freed up to focus on getting new clients and creating more designs you can sell.
Do you have a question you’d like answered in an upcoming Dear Dakota post? Be sure to sign up for The Weekly Install® to get access to complimentary consulting.
Additional Resources:
For more on why things like online shops and affiliate posts aren’t often profitable, even for our designers with huge audiences, read about the marketing tactics that don't work for interior designers.
For everything you need to showcase your expertise and build your audience on auto-pilot to PREPARE your company for selling digital products, start with one of our lead magnet templates here.
For how to source, price, and sell to-the-trade furnishings, check out our Beyond Retail course and learn how to incorporate product sales profitably into your business
