In Ask an Influencer, Business of Home explores the creator economy. This week, we spoke with Fort Lauderdale–based interior designer and content creator Galey Alix (@galeyalix).
From the outside, Galey Alix appeared to have it all: a high-powered job at Goldman Sachs, a doting fiancé, and a palatial 10,000-square-foot home in Connecticut where her married life would soon begin. In the months leading up to the wedding, she ran herself into the ground ensuring that everything was perfect, resigning from her job in 2017 in order to relocate to and fully renovate the new house in videos she posted on Instagram for her 900 followers.
Behind the scenes, it was that same drive for perfection—to close out her career with top sales rankings while also designing the perfect home—that caused her mental health to suffer, ultimately leading to the end of her relationship and a solo move back to her home state of Florida, settling in Fort Lauderdale.
“When I landed there, I didn’t have my job, I didn’t have my fiancé, I didn’t have the house that I worked so hard on,” she says. “I suddenly felt like the biggest failure in every way I could fail, and I couldn’t handle it, so I logged out of Instagram and I deleted the app. I didn’t want people asking, ‘Where are the wedding photos? Where are the honeymoon photos? What’s going on?’”
For the next three months, Alix dedicated herself to healing: She checked into a therapy program, took a social media break and managed to get her old job back. After reaching a place of stability, she decided to return to Instagram to check up on her friends. She quickly discovered that several of her videos had gone viral. “When I logged in, I didn’t recognize a single name in my DMs,” says Alix. “I had hundreds of strangers who were writing to me asking if they could fly me to Australia to work on their garage, or Boston to do their living room, or Austria to do their mountain home.” She decided to take on one home renovation project in the local area under one condition: She wouldn’t charge for her services, but in exchange she got total control over the design scheme. “Being able to perfect other people’s homes allowed me to stop perfecting myself and my life,” she says.
When Alix posted a video of the project’s big reveal, it quickly garnered 30 million views. Her growing audience prompted her to leave her Wall Street job a second time, star in her own HGTV show, and roll out a rug collection with home brand Livabliss. Today, she has 1.7 million Instagram followers and 2.8 million TikTok followers.
Ahead, Alix shares a step-by-step process for hooking viewers in your videos; her best practices for boundary-setting on social media; and how she found success through a combination of storytelling and selling.
Story Selling
As Alix’s design operations have scaled up, she has brought on a number of team members to help execute her mad-dash weekend home-makeovers, including an assistant, an electrician, a woodworker and various design helpers. The one task she’ll never delegate: social media.
“I do all of my own editing and posting—not a second of anything you see was done by anybody else. This is what made me grow, so I take my editing as seriously as I take my design,” she says. “During my days at Goldman Sachs, where I was selling for a living, I realized that telling a story is what gets something sold, so I needed to keep ‘story-selling’ about myself and my capabilities in design in order to keep up with my TV show and my social media growing bigger, faster and further. That’s all Galey-coded, forever.”
In her content today, Alix has committed to making each video a complete story, ensuring that every element—audio, visual and design details—aligns with that purpose. A recent Reel announcing her rug launch, for example, begins with shots of empty rooms in her home, then transitions to shots of rugs being rolled out and installed, and ultimately finishes with fully furnished spaces and close-up details of each piece. She also took care to include footage of her dog Charlye, who recently passed, as a reminder that a percentage of each sale goes to a foundation supporting animal rescue and rehabilitation.
Instant Gratification
The challenge of the social media scroll is that the first few seconds of each video need to hook a viewer enough that they’ll stay—and the rest of the clip needs to encourage them to visit your profile and continue seeking out more content. In her time as a content creator, Alix has nailed down a game plan for each step of the way.
“We’re in the era of immediate gratification,” she says. “If you think that just a beautiful space is enough to make somebody keep watching—it’s not.”
In the first three seconds, she recommends aiming for one of three emotional reactions: to make a viewer laugh, inspire them, or—her favorite—leave them confused. (In Alix’s case, that could be as simple as playing a video in reverse so power tools appear to sail into frame on their own.) In the next five seconds, she aims to educate, giving viewers a sense of the scope of the project she’s embarking on, or the complex needs of her clients. Then she closes out the video with some suspense—a clip of her clients reacting to the design, for example, but without showing the design itself. For that, viewers will have to seek out more of Alix’s content.
Getting Real
When your business relies on social media, Alix admits that it’s difficult to step away when you need to—the pressures of keeping up with an online audience can become overwhelming. Still, she makes sure to take breaks, sometimes logging out for four to five days at a time in order to reconnect with herself and seek inspiration elsewhere.
“The algorithm has gotten so good, it just keeps feeding you—two hours will go by, and [you’ll think], ‘What just happened?’” she says. “I set boundaries of how much time I’ll spend [on the apps], and at night, I put my phone on airplane mode, in a drawer in my kitchen, and I literally won’t think about it.”
One adage Alix lives by: “Your secrets make you sicker.” Rather than keeping her mental health challenges entirely out of sight on social media, she has embraced opening up a dialogue with the launch of Wholeheartedly, a podcast focused on mental health, design and social media. In an industry where such issues are rarely discussed openly, she has found a loyal audience drawn to her sense of openness.
“The design world is very polished and curated, and thrives on perfectionism and beauty,” she says. “I want to show that you can make things beautiful and wonderful, and you can have fun doing it without taking yourself too seriously. You can be struggling with things and still not feel like you won’t be as successful or that there’s something broken about you—because you’re not broken, you’re just bruised.”
