Meet Brian and Jess

Show Notes

Design Board Bootcamp

Photoshop Launch

Havenly

Laurel & Wolf

The Design Cure Facebook Group

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Episode Transcript

Jess: [00:00:00] This is The Design Cure podcast bringing you all the latest information online interior design.

Jess: [00:00:07] All right guys welcome to the design career podcast. This is our first episode. We’re coming from Vancouver.

Brian: [00:00:16] Hey welcome guys. Yeah, I’m Brian this is Jess. Today we’re going to be talking about empowering designers online to help their businesses out. A few years ago we had a struggle, and we wanted to get out of our corporate jobs. So yeah

Brian: [00:00:33] I was working for an architecture firm. Brian was working for a movie production company right. Yeah. And we’re like you know we want to spend more time with family. We want to travel more. How do we do this? We learned about

Brian: [00:00:49] How to struggle in Thailand. So yeah basically I’m I come from a graphic design and animation Media Arts and Animation background. We met at art school she was going to school for interior design, and we graduated with these two assets and then we couldn’t figure out how to come together. Really we were kind of in our own worlds, and we just weren’t digging the corporate thing. We’d been an office job forever, so we just had at one point like were out

Jess: [00:01:17] How do we start our own business and our first business was Quest Stories a children’s book.

Brian: [00:01:25], So that was our first attempt at combining our assets.

Jess: [00:01:28] It was good we learned a lot a ton. We learned how to make websites. We learned how to grow email lists. You know the importance of that, not just online marketing. So it was a great learning experience in that sense.

Brian: [00:01:43] Yeah we’re trying to piece together any information we could find about marketing and then this whole online movement and. Yeah, but it was just a struggle. Like for a while, we’re just trying to make ends meet. Yeah, and Jess started working on some projects.

Jess: [00:01:58] Yes so. So at this point this was three years ago we moved like we mentioned we moved to Thailand we were there for about a year, and I started working freelance for drafting companies and then you know from there I heard about these e-design companies that were popping up like Laurel and Wolf and Havenly. They were they were starting to come up around that time, and I have never heard of you know working online as an interior designer so something totally new for me. I was I was blown away, and you know.

Brian: [00:02:35] I remember you. Telling me about it. You were super excited about it.

Jess: [00:02:38] Yeah I was super excited about it because you know I could work on my own on my own time. I was getting projects from them so you know it was it was really exciting for me at the time because I didn’t have that experience with just working with clients online. So it was a great learning experience in that sense.

Brian: [00:02:57] Meanwhile I was failing at trying to sell this children’s books that I had illustrated. And Jess was helping me kind of write and market it and it was just not working out.

Brian: [00:03:05] So I ended up taking my graphic design and my animation backgrounds and trying to teach as much as I could so I was putting out free YouTube videos, and I ended up getting picked up by some pretty cool companies to have me start making courses for them. So we started like figuring out different ways to make income online. You know she was doing her design, and I was doing this teaching thing that the children books started to kind of fade away as we started coming back into our roots which were design. But we learned some pretty valuable lessons.

Jess: [00:03:43] Yeah. So when I was looking when I was working for Laurel & Wolf, I quickly learned that my portfolio wasn’t where it should have been.  I had to provide these design boards to my clients that were in Photoshop. And the way I learned Photoshop in school was not you know the right way it was.

Brian: [00:04:10] I don’t know they don’t go into depth with teaching Photoshop better in school.

Jess: [00:04:16] Yeah. It’s just like how to put together vintage or restore vintage photos. It’s not industry specific toward interior design. So when I started taking on these jobs, I was spending way too much time just trying to piece together a 3D room, and Brian saw that I was struggling with this. And together we came up with you know workflow that helped me speed up my game when I was presenting Boards to clients.

Brian: [00:04:47] Right because like these companies that you were working for there they weren’t paying much and they were expecting a nice result. So we had to figure out a way to kind of cut the time and energy it took for each client that you had.

Jess: [00:05:00] Yeah exactly. And you know once we came up with our Kit we saw OK this is something that we could share with other designers in the community. And you know they’re going to get a lot of value out of this, so we started putting together these tutorials and templates to help designers in the community, so that is how The Design Cure started.

Brian: [00:05:24] Yes it was it was pretty cool just to see how many people reacted to it and like you know we started building a community around it, and it’s been cool to have so much support and be able to help a lot of people as well. So I guess I mean the breakdown of what we’re just talking about is we learned that a portfolio is critical. We learned so much about marketing during this time and how important that is. And it’s something that we’re still learning. And also I don’t know how is this podcast can be different.

Jess: [00:06:00] Well I think we want to focus on interviewing industry leaders that are just killing it online and you know what are they doing that is working for them and what could we do to learn from them. So I think that’s kind of where our niche is for this podcast is just how to win online as an interior designer when there’s so much competition. And you know so much noise, and you just want to make it on your own and not be working for pennies.

Brian: [00:06:41] Yeah I mean we’re trying to like stuff as much learning as we’ve learned over the last few years. Plus like just get these industry leaders to help speed it up as well for you guys. We’re just trying to bring all the pieces and parts together. So if you’re interested, I hope you go and subscribe to our channel. We’re probably not going to be doing too many more videos, but we just want to do this one up front just to introduce ourselves to you and just invite you to be a part of this movement that we’re trying to make happen. So yeah.

Jess: [00:07:14] Thanks for listening guys.

Jess: [00:07:15] Thank you. We’ll talk to soon

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