Christina Kittelstad is a tutor of QC Design School and an accomplished color consultant, home stager and painter whose work has been featured on HGTV’s show House Hunters. She is the owner and lead color consultant for Spiral Design Color Consulting. She’s best known for creating beautiful, functional spaces through the use of color and creating a sense of style and personality that’s as unique as each of her clients.
As a color consultant, you’ll have the opportunity to work with a variety of home design professionals. This can include interior decorators and interior designers—but it’ll also include more specific types of professionals such as flooring, fabric, and textile designers, window treatment specialists, home stagers, architects, and feng shui consultants.
Many project tasks of both color consultants and interior designers overlap. You may be wondering what the best approach is to properly market your skills and develop your partnerships. Color consultants can highly benefit and compliment other home design professionals, and visa versa. It’s important to market to them and let them know how you can assist them with their clients.
Get Involved and Make Connections with Design Professionals
The best way to market your skills and services to interior designers and decorators is through strategic networking. Make time to attend networking events such as industry events, gallery shows, showroom events, workshops, and special guest presentations. Getting involved with your local Chamber of Commerce, design associations and design groups allows you the opportunity to not only stay on top of the latest industry products and trends, but it also allows you to easily connect with other designers. This can lead to opportunities for you to share about your business while establishing a relationship of trust and familiarity.
Not everyone jumps for joy at the thought of attending such events. But it is a key factor in getting your business out there and connecting with the right people. There is no need to attend every event out there. Choose to attend events that are a good fit for your services and that also provide a learning opportunity.
Share Your Work…And Theirs
When attending industry and networking events, it’s important to be ready, organized and confident to share your work with other designers and potential business partners. When a designer asks you what you do, be more than ready to share your services in one simple and concise sentence. Tell them who you are, the name of your company, and what you offer. Bring business cards to share. It’s also very important to take an interest in their work and the current projects they are working on. This allows you the opportunity to learn how you can best assist them and potentially serve their clients with your own unique skill set.
The more you talk about your services, the easier it becomes. You never know when the opportunity will arise to share, so always be ready. Sometimes, you may find that it’s not a great fit and that’s perfectly okay. Other times, you will find it’s a perfect match. Stay true to what you offer and play to your strengths. Be flexible when appropriate.
Don’t forget the importance of referring designers to YOUR clients when it’s a great fit, too. This will encourage them to keep you in mind on the next project that pops up on their radar. Consider sharing each other’s business information and links on your marketing materials and website as well, to encourage traffic for both of you.
Collaborate with fellow interior decorators and designers
As you connect with home designers and interior decorators, remember that each of you brings a unique set of skills and strengths to the table. Focus on your strengths and share with them how you can help design a project. Show how your knowledge of color can assist them with their space planning. And, most importantly, how a collaboration is beneficial to both of you as well as the client.
Working together in a small or a large capacity from the project start allows maximum collaboration. You both can bring your talents in and offer ideas that the other may not have considered. For example, a designer may choose a rug or fabric selection, which inspires you to create the perfect color scheme. A designer may not enjoy choosing colors or feel as confident with color selection, and prefers to focus on space planning instead. By collaborating together, you both can offer your clients a full spectrum of services that create a beautiful design in the end. By clearly communicating the benefits of collaborating together, you can market your skills and theirs while creating opportunities for perfect partnerships.
Do you have any marketing tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment!
This was very good to know and help me. I am currently taking interior decorating and I also signed up for Color Consultant. I decided the two together in my case would be a good fit. I am excited to learn more about colors it will help me further my business with my interior decorating.