In our new series Ask an Expert, we’re speaking to the specialists who help design firms thrive. This week, we spoke with Anastasia Casey, the founder and CEO of Austin-based IDCO Studio, which specializes in digital branding and web design for the interior design trade.

Casey started her career in marketing, offering web design services as a freelance gig. Before she knew it, her side hustle was outpacing her entire salary at her day job. While she started out taking a broad range of clients, she was able to home in on her passion for working with interior designers—and now has a roster that features industry elites like Nate Berkus, Amber Lewis and Marie Flanigan. Here, Casey talks about the evolution of her business and what it takes to stand out in the increasingly competitive field of digital branding.

Doing graphic design specifically for interior designers is pretty niche. How did you end up here?
I went to art school in San Francisco for advertising and graphic design. And at the time, I was like, “I’m going to be a magazine editor.” It was the early 2000s and magazines seemed shiny and exciting. Instead, I ended up working as a director of marketing for a luxury real estate firm in Austin. That’s when I got to know interiors. I got to tour amazing houses in the city and I began to understand the luxury market more. It was a boutique real estate firm that specialized in high-end homes, particularly historic neighborhoods, and I really started to fall in love with that. I was doing some freelance web design because my day job was not a very high-paying role. I posted on Instagram and I was like, “If anybody needs a website, I’m your gal.” And I made my entire annual salary in one month doing web design.

That’s crazy! Who were those first clients?
It was mostly for businesses in creative industries—wedding planners, salons and interior designers—but also financial consultants or doctor’s offices. It didn’t take me very long to start to weed out the ones I found more boring.

Was there a turning point when you realized you only wanted to work with designers?
I went on a work retreat that was hosted by Fiona Humberstone, a U.K.-based brand strategist. In my industry, she’s the Amber Lewis. She’s the pinnacle.

She was hosting this retreat in Mallorca, Spain. It was very expensive. I remember my sweet husband was like, “I’ll cancel my gym membership. Sign up for the payment plan. You have to do this.” And so I went to the brand stylist retreat and the whole thing was very woo-woo, touchy-feely. There was a psychologist there. I thought we were going to be reviewing portfolios and talking about proposals!

They kept telling me I had to say no to the wrong clients and really target who I wanted to work with. Finally, on the fourth day, the psychologist had us write down our five favorite projects. Four of mine were for interior designers. I was like, “Oh, OK, got it!” I finally believed them after that very black-and-white exercise.

Once you realized that, what was your next step?
On my flight home, I rewrote all of my website copy. Then I started photographing my tiny little 600-foot bungalow—I worked with an interior designer friend to help me spruce it up, and I started making content that I felt designers would be interested in. I knew that logos are only interesting when they’re immediately thinking about that, so I wanted to start making more lifestyle content that would resonate.

Now IDCO Studio [has become] an online resource for designer business tools—anything from sourcing checklists to packages and service agreements that we’ve created with an attorney.

The bulk of what we started doing originally was easy-to-use website templates specifically for interior designers and all of their client process documents. People could select the look that worked best for them. During Covid, [that arm of the business] was huge. We grew really fast. My team was up to 20 employees.

How has the market changed since that time?
When I started IDCO, we were the only ones doing this. Since then, there are a lot of other studios that offer very similar templates for a lot less than what we charge. And I have a moral obligation to our [prior] clients—if someone else paid $580 for a product, I’m not going to now sell the same thing for $50. I just can’t do that. So we are in a transition phase and we are working on something that we will launch in Q1 next year. IDCO Studio will be transforming into a software browser app that will be a proposal-builder for designers. We’ve collected hundreds of proposals from friends and clients [to figure out:] How do we actually price out our services for this project? We’ve taken all of that proprietary data, aggregated it, and based off of people’s zip codes, we can tell [designers if their prices are] in market range or if they’re below it. The next [step of the process in the tool], which will be a subscription model, will have the option to have us build a proposal for you. So it’s a very exciting thing that we are working on. But until then, we still have all of our templates and we do branding and websites for designers.

We also have a custom arm of the business—we’ve done all of Amber Lewis’s websites. We’ve done Nate Berkus and Marie Flanigan. If someone wants something that’s more bespoke than what our templates offer, we provide those services as well.

What is the difference between coming to you and buying a template off Etsy, for example?
I think there are a few things. Because I have such incredible relationships with people in the industry, I also have an unmatched breadth of proprietary information about what clients are most drawn to. And I have a unique editorial eye—I think that if you look at an IDCO template versus an Etsy template with the discerning eye that [designers] have, there’s a clear elevation in design from that standpoint.

We’ve weeded out the unnecessary pages that don’t need to be there. We know that it’s in vogue right now to have an “ethos” or “philosophy” page about what a studio believes rather than a “team” page. Every time we put out a template, it’s tailored to what we know is happening in the industry. I don’t think traditional web designers have that pulse and understanding on what top designers are including on their websites now.

Are there services that you offer that you feel like customers aren’t as aware of?
On our custom side of the business, we separate the studio under a brand called Kwin Made, which is separate from our “add to cart’” products. On that side, we have an incredible in-house videographer and we film installed projects for designers so that they have video assets for their social platforms. [Our videographer] Jesse is such an artist, and my very favorite thing in all of the world is to be on set with designers, and make them feel really comfortable, and do interviews with them.

How does that video shoot work?
We follow along right behind the photographer when a project is getting photographed. The designer can be pretty hands-off, because the room’s already styled. We go in and I’m there to guide them. I know what the finished editorial product should look like. We do horizontal options for YouTube and vertical for social media. We have filmed for everyone from Tiffany Lee Design in Canada to Audrey Scheck here in Austin. We’ve done many reveals for Marie Flanigan, and those days are just my happiest, 100 percent. We’ve had a lot of website clients who are like, “We want to add video,” and it was nice to be able to offer people the option to create content that could really elevate their websites. It feels like it rounds out the full branding package. Even if someone has a website and has branding, our ability to execute video is elevated compared to what people are able to produce on their own.

What are some of the more dramatic before-and-afters you’ve worked on?Some of those more dramatic ones were people who [originally] had a commerce element to their site. It’s often very disjointed in terms of representing their design studio well [because they’re] like, “We’ve got to get product on the page.” Our team has an on-staff Shopify developer who is amazing; we’ve been able to design sites that seamlessly toggle between commerce and studio.

Are you getting any questions about AI search optimization?
Our templates are all built on Wix and Wix Studio, which are two different platforms within the Wix universe. They both have a great SEO walkthrough program that just added a whole section on AI. It’ll walk you through how to make sure you’re showing up in Claude and any other AI platform.

In terms of web design, what do your tiers of service look like?
We have three different buckets of web design. There are website template options that you can “add to cart” and buy. You implement it with our instructions, which you get at the time of download. You handle everything. You get immediate access to that site. Our more common [tier] is that people pick a template and then they select our services for copywriting and implementation.

And then we have a semi-custom option, which is still a template, but we really customize it—that timeline is a three-week turnaround before you see the initial draft, and the price point is right about $10,000. That’s been the real sweet spot. And then we have an entirely custom, from-scratch option where the pricing can range [closer to] $20,000.

Other than the design aspect, are there digital pain points that clients frequently mention?
Often people come to us because they previously had worked with a WordPress developer and that person probably was an SEO expert who created a website for [the designer] that they are unable to update themselves. Websites are a lot more accessible for people to work on their own now than they were even 10 years ago, so a lot of people come to us saying, “I cannot use this site.” We have a very well-integrated SEO presence every time we launch for someone, but we are aesthetically driven. That’s why I think we are a unique studio—because I care about what it looks like.

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