Last week, an interior designer was arrested in Southern California. The designer, Victoria Rogers, was taken into custody in Lake Arrowhead, a mountain resort town 80 miles east of Los Angeles. The charges—nine in all—were serious, ranging from grand theft to diversion of construction funds. In essence, they boil down to a simple allegation: Rogers took her client’s money and disappeared.
According to a press release put out by the local sheriff’s department, Rogers signed an agreement with a Lake Arrowhead homeowner to renovate a kitchen and three bathrooms, and asked for a deposit of $67,500. She then “delayed the project with various excuses” for nearly a year and ghosted the client when asked for a refund. The release says that an investigation uncovered additional victims, who suffered thousands of dollars in losses.
Court records show that this isn’t the first time Rogers has gotten into a legal dispute with a client. A lawsuit filed last July, also in Lake Arrowhead, alleges that she entered into an agreement with another homeowner and asked for $30,000 to be deposited into a “reserve account,” then refused to return it despite the project stalling out before the purchasing phase. Another, filed in San Diego County in 2023, accused Rogers of taking on contracting work without a license on a project that ran steeply over budget, then walking off the job. Rogers did not respond to a request for comment.
Stories like this undoubtedly give designers a bad name. When the news broke on the San Francisco site SFGate and was posted on Instagram, readers poured into the comments to share their own horror stories—and some hot takes on the profession in general. “These are professional thieves. Do a background check and criminal history check before signing anything,” wrote one.
“Shady designers will bill you for hours they didn’t do anything. Or, in some design contracts, you agree to their percentage over cost for product [and] some of them will lie and pad that,” wrote another. “All interior designers bilk clients,” said a third. “It’s happened to me twice. Never again!”
Industry fraud might not always culminate in mug shots and headlines, but it’s more common than you think. Designers are quick to offer stories about other firms whose unscrupulous business practices made waves in their community—and the trail of wary clients left in their wake.
“There was a designer in Tampa who was scamming clients and got caught,” says Joe Human, founder of St. Petersburg–based Designs by Human. “We met two potential clients in the same neighborhood who both were leery about hiring a designer and asked a lot more questions. [It’s] their right to ask all the questions they want, but it became more accusatory—like we were going to scam them too.” (Neither homeowner ended up engaging a design firm.)
A similar scandal rocked the New Orleans design community around the time designer Hattie Collins launched her firm there in 2019. “We had a situation with a guy who was kind of an industry darling,” she recalls. The designer in question had recently closed his retail store abruptly. “It started coming out that he was [scamming clients] and he disappeared. I mean, he literally fell off the face of the planet.”
This event, along with ambient skepticism about the design industry, led Collins to take a transparency-forward approach. “I heard too many stories when I was first starting out about people not trusting designers, or feeling like they were getting the wool pulled over their eyes,” says the Hattie Sparks founder. “There was a lot of frustration around the mystery of pricing and why things were marked up a certain percentage. So from the beginning, I always thought: ‘If we’re aiming to build a relationship based on trust, then they should know where the money’s going.’”
She’s not alone in that mindset. Transparency as a business philosophy took the design industry by storm as part of a broader cultural shift during the information age, which led to the widespread availability of product prices online and armed clients with enough information to ask pointed questions about fee structures, trade pricing and markups.
Before prices and business practices hit the web, price lists for trade-only brands weren’t public, and designers were the gatekeepers to custom furnishings and fabrics. Comparison shopping simply wasn’t an option. But by the mid-2010s, the landscape had changed. Reverse-image searching made a once-opaque industry more accessible to consumers; formerly trade-exclusive brands began to sell their products online to the general public; and direct-to-consumer brands flooded the space, setting new expectations around what products should cost. As a result, clients increasingly pushed for proposals that offered visibility into how exactly their budget was being spent.
“Information is such a commodity today,” says Louis Taylor, managing partner at New York architecture and design firm Schafer & Company. “The transfer of information and knowledge is so quick—there’s so much out there, and so many ways to connect. Before, clients couldn’t connect [with others] to find out how the process went or what the numbers should be when working with a specific designer or contractor, but now they’re not in the dark. They are a lot more informed than they would have been even 10 years ago, and that’s really important. The way they demand [transparency] today is going to change the design world.”
Collins followed her intuition and adopted a flat 30 percent markup on the pretax cost of all goods—a fairly standard approach to cost-plus pricing. But she also used the client portal of the FF&E sourcing platform Gather to share information about each item specified, where clients can log in to find a detailed breakdown of the costs and logistics of their orders.
“I think it’s just best practice to be really clear,” she says. “When it comes to pricing, it’s always been my philosophy that it’s their money. It shouldn’t be shrouded with mystery. I want everybody to be on the same page so that we’re not six or seven months down the road and it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t know about this,’ or ‘I shouldn’t have to pay for that.’ I want to make sure they understand their financial responsibility before we move forward.”
A decade ago, Tracy Morris got an unusual call from a prospective client. “He says, ‘Listen, I was referred to you by a friend, but I have to tell you: I don’t like interior designers,’” recalls the McLean, Virginia–based designer. The client’s distrust was warranted: He explained that after he and his wife paid for a whole home’s worth of furnishings, their designer vanished. Their money was gone, and they never received a stick of furniture.
Ten years and three projects later, the client is a dear friend and Morris can look back on that call with a laugh. But at the time, the project caused her to take a closer look at her business and fine-tune some of her processes to foster deeper trust. “We were already price transparent,” she says. “We put our designer net price on the client’s estimate along with the markup price, so you know what we’re paying and you see what your price is. He was thrilled with that right away.”
Her firm was already organized and process-driven. But for this project, she decided to let the client see more of that internal infrastructure. She added a schedule to the contract that clearly outlined what he should expect every step of the way, then sent regular email updates as the project progressed. The extra layers of communication worked wonders. “It just put him at ease—and as a result, it has changed our process in such a positive way, because we’re able to assuage any fears with our clients,” she says. “I thought, ‘You know, he’s probably not the only one who was questioning where their money is going.’”
Today, that buttoned-up and hypercommunicative approach continues to resonate with once-burned clients. In fact, Morris estimates that 25 to 30 percent of her clientele come to her with projects they had started with another designer. Although it’s rarely a case of fraud that fractured the relationship with the prior firm, she takes on many clients who have had their trust broken.
“I hear it all the time: ‘I just haven’t heard from my designer,’ or ‘I’m not really sure what to expect,’ or ‘They allegedly ordered things, but I haven’t heard anything,’” she says. “We receive a lot of clients from situations where the communication was very poor, or where there isn’t a lot of confidence or trust in the designer’s ability because the initial portion of the project wasn’t handled expeditiously. That can lead the client to think that the whole process is going to be a problem, and then they begin to question everything. I know it takes a lot of work, but that constant level of communication [we offer]—I really do think changes the game.”
Seth Kaplowitz, an attorney who works with design professionals, takes a simple approach to the issue: The best way to make yourself seem trustworthy to prospective clients is simply to be trustworthy. Instead of overburdening clients with an exhaustive contract, making a firm’s policies clear and concise demonstrates proficiency and accountability. “Have a clean contract that says the right things, but doesn’t say too much, and is written in a way that people can read it without having to go get their own lawyer. Fundamentally, your contract should indicate, ‘This is what I’m going to do, this is how I’m going to do it, and this is what I expect in return,’” he says. “The easiest way to get out in front of a potential issue is by demonstrating to your potential client your level of professionalism.”
The goal here, he says, is to foster trust—which dense contract clauses can quickly undermine. “Sometimes, when somebody is really trying to convince me that they’re not going to do the wrong thing, it makes me worried. Why are they thinking about it so much? Are they planning on doing the wrong thing?” says Kaplowitz. “It’s hard to convince someone you’re not going to do something wrong without making it look like you may do something wrong.” He also notes that the more-is-more approach to contract writing isn’t necessarily adding layers of protection for you or your client. There’s ultimately no amount of legalese that can truly prevent fraud: If a client has paid for product that doesn’t get purchased, they may simply be out the money. “There is just no easy contractual mechanism to protect your potential client,” he says. “Part of the reason why people are talking about this [case] is that, in reality, this doesn’t happen a lot [whether there’s an ironclad contract or not].”
For Taylor, transparency has become a nonnegotiable hallmark of Schafer & Company’s operations. A former corporate auditor, he has applied that same financial rigor to the projects he oversees since joining the firm in 2010.
“We’ve had a couple clients come to us that have had issues in the past where the money was being mismanaged or something fishy showed up—or even where they felt that some of the money was stolen,” he explains. “They were always wondering, ‘How do I know what the money I give you is paying for?’”
To eliminate those questions, the firm developed systems that make its financial dealings instantly verifiable. Chief among them is opening a separate bank account for each client (“It’s under our business name, but we give them full access to those accounts,” says Taylor) and providing a statement at the end of each month that pairs bank reconciliations with purchase orders and a copy of the client approval for every purchase made. In this approach, trust isn’t rooted in blind faith, but in clear and consistent documentation.
There’s clearly extra effort involved—but it’s work clients are willing to pay for, Taylor says, for the peace of mind that comes with it. The firm’s money management strategy aligns with business consultant Sean Low’s perspective on how to handle the often significant amount of funds that pass through a design firm in the course of a project. “Your client should be able to see their money anytime they want, and they should be able to watch it be withdrawn and spent,” says Low, who recommends setting up accounts that give clients view-only access. “A designer’s fees can go into their own account—that’s their money. But what you’re spending on a client’s behalf goes into a separate account, and that money should never be commingled. That should be one of the first conversations you have with your client—cut any concerns off at the start. Say, ‘We respect your money, and your right to see your money.’”
Low also cautions against relying solely on accounting integrations on project management platforms, which are inherently dependent on human input. “[They’re] great at telling you where the money is supposed to be, but there’s no guarantee that the money is actually there,” he says. A separate bank account neatly creates a safeguard and prevents money mistakes. “With the capabilities of digital banking, there’s a very simple solution that any firm can put in place and prevent them from ever having to commingle their money with their client’s money.”
Even amid the groundswell of transparency, well-founded arguments against the approach remain. “No [other] business shows the client or consumer their books,” says Atlanta designer Mallory Mathison. “[We are] explaining, educating and setting the standard that we are our clients’ biggest advocate—we are working to not only give them the best design, but to protect their investment and help them spend wisely. But custom procurement costs what it costs, and we are running a for-profit business. No one goes into a restaurant and asks the sommelier how much he paid for the bottle. They are there for the experience, even when the same bottle is half the price at the local grocery.”
Mathison argues that if anything, the normalization of the idea that she should show every receipt erodes trust. “I think the whole industry is damaged by anyone suggesting that a professional should ‘open their books,’” she says. “This is an experience and a service. No one has to hire us, but if they do, they sign my contract knowing full well the process and estimated expense, but also that there is no haggling.”
Designers in this camp are often reticent to speak on the record, worrying that their objections to disclosing their financial details will be misconstrued as a cover-up of misdeeds. But many are quick to point out how conversations about transparency often assume that the designer is the only party who must earn trust. They argue that conversations about trust should flow both ways.
Unlike a retailer setting a standardized product, designers rely on a complex mix of income streams—typically some combination of design fees, project management fees and markups—to build profitable firms. It can be a fragile ecosystem that becomes harder to sustain when every line item is visible and up for review. It also does little to combat negative stereotypes of designers as flighty creatives who aren’t responsible money managers, which many say they still encounter.
Many designers also note that while its aims are noble, transparency in practice requires firm boundaries—and that being open about your process doesn’t mean abandoning the business practices that protect your firm, or tailoring your financial practices to a client’s whims. Deceptive practices with money run both ways, and while designers who take a client’s money and run occasionally make headlines, the clients who contest every invoice or ghost without paying their bill typically don’t. It’s important that any effort toward greater transparency doesn’t chip away at a firm’s ability to protect itself.
A prime example: Experts agree that clients should always pay the full cost of goods before an order is placed. (That’s another reason establishing a separate bank account for client purchasing can come in handy.) That practice recently saved New York designer Anelle Gandelman of A-List Interiors from catastrophe. “I have a client who just made the news mid-project for a scandalous reason, leading to them filing for bankruptcy,” she explains. The client’s project was well underway, with orders already in progress. “If I didn’t collect 100 percent upfront, this client would have ruined my business.”
Take a deeper dive into the Instagram comments about the SFGate story and you’ll find another force at play: Designers have entered that chat to defend their profession from the naysayers.
When headlines like this hit, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to feel wounded and discouraged. “People like this make it so hard for the rest of us who take running our business just as seriously as the creative part,” says Niki Papadopoulos, a principal at Atlanta firm Williams Papadopoulos Design, who argues that the intimate nature of design work—in the home, where people feel most safe—makes trustworthiness all the more essential. But when that trust is violated, one thing is clear: The damage ripples across the profession.
“It makes my stomach turn thinking about the repercussions [of this case],” says Huntington, New York–based designer Christine Conte. “It is so hard to gain a level of trust from a client. I had one client who asked me for three references—at first, I was really thrown by it, but now I understand she was just doing her due diligence.”
Yet if the conversations that have emerged in the wake of the Lake Arrowhead designer’s arrest can teach us anything, it may be about finding a new definition of transparency—one that’s measured by how well a designer makes their clients feel seen, heard and informed rather than simply by how much information they share.
At Schafer & Company, Taylor operates on the belief that client confidence comes from a steady cadence of consistent communication—an ethos that stems from early exposure to an entrepreneur in another high-end service industry. “I had a mentor who owned a lot of restaurants, and he would talk about touchpoints,” he says. “He would teach his waiters to put their fingers on the table. When I asked why, he said, ‘Because touching the table is like touching the people and connecting with them.’ So they put their fingers on the table as they ask, ‘How is the service? Can I get you anything else?’ If you relate that to the work we do, it’s about checking in with the client: ‘How are we doing? Do you feel like you’ve got all the information you need?’ Hopefully, when they are finished with the project, they walk away with that same feeling as the experience of good service in a restaurant.”
No matter how you feel about opening your books, opening a meaningful dialogue is surely a solid starting point.
Additional reporting by Haley Chouinard and Fred Nicolaus
