Not everybody has the skills and aesthetic sense to properly decorate the interior and exterior of their homes and gardens. No doubt there are people out there who will pay good money for someone with those home decorating skills.
So, if you are passionate about making home beautiful, then a home decoration business might be something you would be interested in. You would get to spend your days decorating houses and would be able to live your passion.
How Can I Decide If Home Decor Is for Me?
Running any kind of business requires self-motivation and discipline. There’s plenty of inspiration to be found for home decoration, but you need to have a good work ethic and be willing to step out of your comfort zone and take control.
One of the better parts of working as a home or office decorator is that you will be working your own hours and will be your own boss. That means you have freedom but also that you are responsible for making things go smoothly.
However, the demands of home decor mean you will likely be working nights and weekends very frequently. So, if you are willing to do a non-traditional schedule, then that is a good indicator you can handle the schedule of being an interior decorator.
1. Whole Room or Whole House Makeovers
When people hear “home decoration” they probably think about changing the furniture, carpets, drapes, painting, and other decorations all throughout some room or the entire house. If you are good at looking at rooms or houses in their entirety and imagining what could be, the whole room or full house decoration might be a great idea to start a business.
If you want to do whole house makeovers, then you will need communication skills and need to build a good rapport with your customers. You need to establish your client’s wants, needs, and dislikes. A good home decorator is a good conversationalist.
2. Home Decor Crowdsourcing
Maybe you are not so much interested in decorating homes and offices yourself but more about hooking people up with decorators who have the best skills. In that case, a crowdsourcing platform for home decorators could be a smart idea. Your platform could be used to facilitate communication between home decor experts and customers who are looking for expert renovations.
The idea is to standardize and streamline the process of working with an interior designer. By matching designers and clients for all kinds of decoration jobs, a crowdsourcing platform not only helps customers find businesses but also vice versa; a win-win for everyone involved.
3. Style Matching
One difficult part people have with interior design is figuring out a consistent theme for making decisions. There is such a wide range of options to choose from that people need quick rules of thumb for deciding things. Style matching (or style profiling) is a way for customers to narrow down their preferences to make choices easier.
One way you can do this is through things like questionnaires and surveys. These kinds of things will help you get to know a customer’s personal preferences so you can create a recommended profile of products and services. There are a lot of opportunities for businesses that help customers refine their taste and choices. A style profiling model also meshes well with ecommerce or affiliate sales.
4. Manufacturer Sales
There is a growing movement to cut out the middleman when it comes to furniture and other decoration sales. Many companies are working directly with furniture and decoration manufacturers to sell products without retail up sale.
This is a welcome service in the home decoration industry which has long supply chains. Removing a good chunk of this supply chain significantly lowers prices giving more affordable options to the consumer.
Selling from the manufacturer works particularly well for designer furniture. The growing demand for such furniture is an opportunity to disrupt the traditional big-box retailers and sell directly to the customer. To make this happen, you will have to make deals with the manufacturer. That way, you can charge much lower prices than a traditional retail spot.
Alternatively, you can also rent out design furniture.
5.Eco-friendly Design Services
Despite what you might think, the interior design industry has far-reaching environmental effects. For example, the kind of wood your furniture is built from might not be sustainable and its removal ultimately destroys ecosystems. The focus of eco-friendly approaches to interior designing is integrating sustainability into company supply chains and reducing carbon footprints.
Certain areas an eco-friendly interior design business can focus on include:
- Locally manufactured sustainably-sourced furniture products that last long.
- A business specializing in upholstery and textiles that do not have any synthetic and potentially harmful chemicals.
- A focus on energy efficiency with interior designs (e.g. lightbulbs, fixtures, appliances, etc).
- A company that only sells naturally sourced home decor products that are built using environmentally safe practices.
There are a lot of options here. The only thing you need is a bit of creativity on how to integrate eco-friendly practices into traditional interior home decors services. There is a big market for eco-friendly products and services in practically every industry, and the interior design industry is no different.
6. Staged Rooms
Many designers like looking at some particular room and trying to work with the pieces to make something amazing. Others prefer dreaming up new rooms from scratch and offering those to customers.
The staged room concept is a popular method that many retailers are taking advantage of. Customers can browse a catalog and choose a fully designed room. Companies can provide entire self-contained rooms for sale. This approach allows some to take a more holistic approach to home decor. It also allows you to exercise your creativity as you get to create entirely new rooms up whole cloth.
Conclusions
Home decor is an exciting industry and there is a lot of potential for growth. All industries are always looking for innovation so there is plenty of room to come up without something unique and capture a niche. Moreover, home decor is a great way to channel your aesthetic passions and is a way to run your own business.
So, if you are interested in interior design and home decor, then starting your own home decor business is a viable strategy.
