During her time as Stark Carpet’s senior vice president of marketing, Monika McCommon oversaw the company’s early ventures into influencer marketing. There, she found plenty of tools connecting brands with influencers, but none specific to the design industry—which, for McCommon, exposed a major gap in the market.
“We would always run up against these types of tools [that] would give us the wrong type of creators, and we would end up with content that didn’t really align with the brand or aesthetic we were looking for,” she says. “I always wished there was something that could service our team and the home industry better, and it just did not exist.”
After leaving Stark, McCommon decided she would be the one to make it happen. The result is The Home Influencers—a new platform that debuted last fall, allowing designers, influencers and content creators to connect with home brands on partnership opportunities specific to the interiors industry. Today, the site has already garnered more than 2,000 designers, with home brand clients spanning categories like wallpaper, rugs, lighting, hardware and bedding.
Once a brand joins the platform, they can peruse a directory of full-time home-focused influencers and producers, plus interior designers who moonlight as social creators—the latter of which make up roughly 25 percent of the site’s roster. Each creator profile features a portfolio of past work to help brands get a feel for their design style.
“If you’re a bedding brand, you get to see [examples of] the bedrooms or the spaces where you would be actually partnering with them on creating content,” says McCommon. “It gives them a lens or a view into the space before agreeing to partner with any creator”—a feature not often available to her in her previous role.
From there, brands can explore any number of partnership opportunities with creators, including launching campaigns tied to designer projects, or pitching products for upcoming installs. Brands can either join with a monthly subscription (starting at $3,200) or on a campaign basis (starting at $3,500), where they submit a brief to The Home Influencers, which will then return with a list of interested creators within 48 hours.
On the platform’s creator side, joining is free, but applicants must undergo a vetting process where they are assessed not only on audience size, but standards like design sensibility, styling skill and content quality.
“The way brand marketing teams are partnering with influencers and creators is typically by reaching out over Instagram or trying to find a creator’s email,” says McCommon. “We can give you dozens of interested creators within two days that have already said, ‘Yes, I’m interested in working with you and collaborating with you.’”
After the matchmaking process is complete, the platform continues to offer support and management through content delivery, from posting and usage rights to payment, product gifting or affiliate partnerships. Elsewhere on the site, subscribers can access additional tools, like a searchable brand library, plus photo and video tools for AI-generated visuals and product renderings.
In McCommon’s opinion, a platform such as The Home Influencers has been a long time coming, due to the home industry’s slow adoption of creator marketing, compared to the fashion, beauty and consumer packaged goods sectors. “Many of the creator platforms that exist or have previously existed were built for consumer products, not ones that require design expertise or longer consideration cycles,” she says. “Home and design brands are really struggling to identify creators that have genuine authority in interiors versus the slew of influencers that are just creating aesthetic content.”
For now, the platform’s team is small (investment has been largely bootstrapped so far), with staff wearing many hats and talent managers pitching creator projects and services to brands directly for content partnerships. But McCommon’s aspirations are big: to capture a growing market amid a rising shift in the way the design industry approaches marketing.
“In the next decade, if not sooner, every home brand will have a creator and influencer strategy—if not a team—dedicated to this,” she says. “Our company, The Home Influencers, can really be the defining partner that helps you grow your business and helps you formulate what that strategy should look like for your brand.”
