A Well-Designed Business® | Interior Design Business Podcast
In today's world being a talented interior designer isn't enough to ensure that you have a profitable and successful business. Design school curricula doesn't always equip you with the business skills to have your interior design business be everything you imagined it would be! A Well-Designed Business® is here to fill in the gaps and give you real live business skills from some of the top interior designers. Your host, LuAnn Nigara shares her 40 years of success in the interior design industry, and she finds the most successful guests to share their interior design business best practices. This podcast is sponsored by Kravet Inc and Mydoma Studio.
Episodes
September 18, 2026 • 72 mins
Today with Kelly Finley:
Kelly Finley built the firm you're told to want. Nine people. Two offices, one in California and one in Georgia. Major projects, press, a team that could run circles without her in the room. From the outside, she'd made it.
Then her husband's job moved the family to Georgia, and the model that got her there started costing her more than it gave back. The distance between offices. The team changes that cam...
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September 15, 2026 • 69 mins
Today on the show I have yet another fabulous business coach who specializes in our industry! Michele Williams is with me! Michele is the founder of Scarlet Thread and Consulting in Atlanta, Georgia. Today we will learn about Michele’s background which includes the financial software industry as well as a business in soft window treatment fabricator. She also has a BS in business administration, a diploma in Christian life co...
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September 11, 2026 • 77 mins
Today with Eileen Hahn
Welcome to A Well-Designed Business, it’s Power Talk Friday! Today, Luann and her guest, Eileen Hahn, dig into how to scale your design business from 2 million to 5 million. Going from 2 to 5 million is not easy, and it does not happen by accident. Intentional is the name of the game when scaling at this level. Who better to take us through that than Eileen? She’s the HR whisperer from ...
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September 8, 2026 • 29 mins
Today With LuAnn Nigara:
When a potential client asks an AI search tool for an interior designer who solves the exact problem you solve, will your business show up?
LuAnn decided to test the question on her own business, and the results were eye-opening. AI understood a lot about LuAnn Nigara Inc., but it missed one of her newest offers and recommended a one-time coaching program from around 2017 that hasn't been available for ye...
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September 4, 2026 • 69 mins
Today With Jennifer Tokatyan:
Today on A Well-Designed Business, I speak with Jennifer Tokatyan, leadership consultant and partner with Eileen B Hahn. With over 20 years of experience, Jennifer shares her proven 7-step framework for building strong company culture that drives team performance and business growth. Don’t miss information about her upcoming LuAnn University course, “Build an Exceptional Team that Gets Res...
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Today with Pamela Durkin:
Welcome to a Well-Designed Business. Today with Pamela Durkin, author of Elevate and owner of Pamela Durkin Designs, we are discussing how to time block our tasks. Pamela is coughing up some great strategies on how we can set specific blocks of time for specific tasks that will help us, get this, “Get more done in one day then you used to get done in an entire week.”
Pick it apart:
[2:00] ...
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August 28, 2026 • 60 mins
Today With Robyn White:
We all know that marketing matters. But so often when I’m talking to newer designers, I realize that marketing is misunderstood—especially when it comes to the luxury client.
My guest today, Robyn White, understands that. Today, she’s here to talk about what marketing really is, how marketing for the luxury client is unique, and how to incorporate your personality and story into your me...
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August 25, 2026 • 73 mins
Today with Deb Mitchell:
Welcome to A Well-Designed Business, it’s Power Talk Friday! LuAnn shares a conversation with Deb Mitchell on today’s show. You may know Deb on Instagram as DesignWriterDeb. She’s a writer specializing in serving interior designers. Did you know that your own writing style can differentiate yourself from other designers in the way it reflects your personality and your style? And that the ...
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August 21, 2026 • 54 mins
Today with Deborah Rosenberg:
What happens when your personal beliefs become part of the way you run your business?
In this Best Of episode of A Well-Designed Business®, LuAnn sits down with Deborah Rosenberg, principal of DiMare Design, to talk about her decision to build a design firm committed to humane, cruelty-free interiors.
Deborah’s approach grew out of her own evolving awareness of how animal-derived materials are...
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August 18, 2026 • 95 mins
Today with Kate O’Hara:
Kate O'Hara is back on A Well-Designed Business, and if you have never heard our past conversations with her, go find them after this one. They are some of the most listened to episodes in this catalog.
This time we go straight at the conversation that makes emerging designers freeze. A client asks to see your trade invoices. A client asks what your markup is. And instead of feeling entitled to run y...
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Today with Mae Reedy, Abigail Kahan & Jennifer Arteaga:
Three interior designers. Three multi-million dollar firms. Jennifer Arteaga, Mae Reedy, and Abigail Kahan all built their businesses in under 10 years, and not one of them stopped hitting growing pains once the revenue got big.
In this Overheard episode, LuAnn sits down with all three to talk about what actually gets hard once you're running a firm beyond the $5 million...
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August 11, 2026 • 25 mins
Today With LuAnn Nigara:
Last week's episode on interior design and trust got a real response, DMs, comments, one designer admitting she wouldn't have known what to say if a client brought up that arrested designer by name.
So this week, LuAnn goes deeper. Two real conversations designers actually have to navigate, a client referencing a headline, and a client asking to see the receipts, and the exact words to use in both. Along ...
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August 7, 2026 • 67 mins
Today with Sandra Funk:
Every business owner is one bad month away from finding out what their business is actually built on. This year, Sandra Funk found out.
Her mom got sick. Two surgeries down, more to go. Her daughters started needing her in a different way. And in the middle of all of it, Sandra learned her own thyroid had been failing her for years, dismissed as just getting older. It was, in her words, everything happenin...
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August 4, 2026 • 30 mins
Today With LuAnn Nigara:
Somewhere on a coaching call this week, a designer told LuAnn the same An interior designer was arrested a few weeks ago. Grand theft, diversion of construction funds, a client out $67,500 and no kitchen to show for it. That part isn't in question. What happened next is.
An industry publication covered the story, and somewhere between reporting the crime and quoting the outrage in the comments, the conv...
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July 31, 2026 • 62 mins
Today with Liz Lidgett:
Art is one of the most overlooked ways designers can elevate a project and expand their own margin, and most designers are sourcing it the hard way.
In this episode, LuAnn sits down with Liz Lidgett, gallerist, art advisor, and author, to talk about what actually happens on the business side of a gallery, and how designers can work with one the smart way. Liz breaks down how trade programs are structured, ...
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July 28, 2026 • 84 mins
Today with Kathleen Reynolds & Lauren Vallario:
Being a great interior designer and being a great CEO are not the same skill set, and Kathleen Reynolds and Lauren Vallario both learned that the hard way. Kathleen has run Kathleen Reynolds Interiors in Greenville, South Carolina for eighteen years. Lauren has run Lauren Vallario Designs in Stamford, Connecticut for over ten. Both built real, busy firms. Neither one had actually...
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July 24, 2026 • 59 mins
Today with Megan Reilly:
Today with Megan Reilly, co-founder and owner of WestEdge Design Fair, LuAnn dives into why designers at every level should stop treating trade shows as shopping trips and start using them as real business development tools. Megan has spent her career on every side of the industry event world, from the Merchandise Mart to Marketing Director of NeoCon and the Architectural Digest Home Design Show, to launch...
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July 21, 2026 • 61 mins
Today with Camia Brown:
In the space of about a year and a half, Camia Brown lost her grandmother, lost her mother, lost a contractor she relied on for most of her projects to suicide, and went through the end of a relationship she thought was headed toward marriage. At the time, she had 15 active projects running, an office, and a team of four. This wasn't a business on the back burner. It was live, growing, and it didn't pause f...
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July 17, 2026 • 48 mins
Today With LuAnn Nigara:
Somewhere on a coaching call this week, a designer told LuAnn the same story she hears constantly: her client is insisting on seeing the invoice, certain she's entitled to know what that ten thousand dollar sofa actually cost. It feels reasonable in the moment. It isn't, and in this episode LuAnn walks through exactly why, using the same standard your clients already apply to a restaurant, and to a nationa...
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July 14, 2026 • 94 mins
Today with Jude Charles:
My guest today has interviewed over one hundred homeowners after they hired an interior designer, and he asks every single one of them the same two questions. Why did you choose this designer? And what would your life look like if you hadn't?
Jude Charles is back on A Well-Designed Business for his fifth appearance, and this time we get into what he has learned after three years fully immersed in the inte...
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