In Ask an Influencer, Business of Home explores the creator economy. This week, we spoke with interior designer Meredith Stern.
Every designer has a space that changed everything for them—for Meredith Stern, it was her college dorm room.
“I became completely immersed in it,” she says of her residence at Emory University in Atlanta. “I was rearranging, styling, obsessing over every detail. And I realized that living in a space that was intentionally designed for me to reflect my story and my personality just had this huge positive impact on my everyday life, my mental health and my mood. From that point on, I knew that design wasn’t just something that I loved—it became sort of a lens through which I viewed the whole world.”
Stern finished out her undergraduate psychology program, and soon after relocated to Brooklyn to attend Pratt’s MFA program in interior design. While there, she attempted to take on her first major renovation project and caught a serious case of burnout, so she left the program to take on administrative jobs in the New York finance world. Even then, she couldn’t seem to shake her design dreams, finding herself restyling her bosses’ offices and helping friends and family with weekend renovation projects.
When the pandemic hit, she and her husband moved back to her hometown in Florida. The couple purchased a big home in need of a major gut renovation—and as she bubbled over with ideas for the space, she sought out a community who could resonate.
On May 21, award-winning nursery and children’s room designer Naomi Coe shares her insights on creating spaces that are not just kid-proof but kid-approved. Click here to learn more and remember, workshops are free for BOH Insiders.
“I was bursting with stuff I wanted to talk about and things I wanted to share, and most of the people who were close to me just weren’t that interested,” says Stern. “So I was like, ‘I’m just going to make an [Instagram] account and just start posting on it. Maybe I’ll find people that are interested in the same thing.”
Before long, she found her community. As her audience grew, so did the number of fellow homeowners who wanted to enlist her for help with their own spaces. By December 2023, Meredith Stern Interiors was born, allowing the designer to finally go all in on her design dreams. Since then, her follower count has continued to grow—today, surpassing 12,000—and serves as a key driver of her business, even as she delves further into design work.
Ahead, Stern shares why a focus on design minutiae is in demand on social media, why it’s essential to have a varied content strategy for Instagram, and why her first hire was an expert in capturing online audiences.
Heaven’s in the Details
Instead of capturing content that reflected the flashier moments in the renovation process (including viral-friendly activities like knocking down walls or ripping out old flooring), Stern found her niche with a strategy that emphasizes the deliberation that goes into making seemingly smaller design decisions—exploring the pros and cons of one faucet versus another, for example, and explaining how aesthetic and functional considerations come into play.
“I like to say I design for the design-obsessed, the clients who crave spaces that are as thoughtful and layered and as individual as they are. They’re the ones who appreciate the hidden details and the intentionality behind every choice,” she says. “That’s a huge part of my brand, and I think that’s how I attract the right clientele, the right following.”
Beyond engaging an audience, Stern’s approach has served as a way to show potential clients the level of care she offers. In addition to focusing on details, she has crafted her messaging to reflect the way working with her might feel: collaborative, deliberate and inclusive.
“It’s a way for my followers to understand how my brain works,” she says. “I think that’s what’s attracted [potential clients]: knowing that if I’m going to help them with their spaces, I’m not just going to make decisions without learning about them, understanding what makes them tick and what they like and dislike. They can trust that I’m going to do their spaces justice.”
Enlisting Expert Help
Social media was critical for launching Stern’s firm, but she never intended it to be her bread and butter. As she began taking on more projects and becoming enmeshed in client work, she realized she needed help in maintaining the workload (and resulting client pipeline) associated with her successful Instagram account. So, rather than searching for a design assistant, she made her first hire in the social media realm.
For the role, she chose a college student who had a large following of her own on TikTok, along with a brand she had built herself with aspirations of starting a social media marketing agency someday. Now, the pair have a collaborative working relationship: The intern generates ideas for the duo to workshop together, then films and edits the resulting content. Beyond that, the intern has pushed her to embrace viral trends in a way that feels aligned with her firm’s image, ultimately expanding her audience and viewership.
“There’s a good give-and-take between us, because I’m always a stickler for staying true to my brand, … but [participating in viral trends] has helped me become discoverable,” says Stern. “My Reels and my TikTok [videos] are pushed out to a lot more people, and that’s then allowed the people who are interested in my services to find me.”
Knowing When to Let Loose
For Stern, part of having an intentional social media strategy includes tailoring content based on where viewers can find it. On Instagram, that means posting different content on her grid—which features an array of inspiration images and project shots—and the Stories feature, where she tends to get personal with content like Q&A’s, work-in-progress photos, and videos explaining her approach to problem-solving when the design process goes awry.
“I think of Reels and posting on the grid more as the way people discover me, and then my Stories as the way people get to know me and understand what makes me tick and how I work—that is where I can express myself the most, and where my audience gets the best understanding of who I am,” she says.
Much like her attention to detail offers clients a taste of what her process is like, getting personal on social media provides a glimpse at the close relationship that lies in store for those who are interested in hiring her for their home project.
“Every one of my clients so far, I’ve become friends with—it’s just something that develops naturally,” Stern says. “That’s a whole different part of the design process and the design world that I love: getting to know people on such a deep level that I can create a space that not only works and functions really well for them, but feels like home to them. It feels like a true reflection of who they are and what they love.”
