In Ask an Influencer, Business of Home explores the creator economy. This week, we spoke with interior designer Tommy Landen Huerter.

Some social media personalities in the design realm reach virality by revealing their ambitious home projects or announcing provocative style choices that spark instant controversy. New York designer Tommy Landen Huerter found his way into the spotlight with something lighter.

“As silly as it sounds, my first videos were interior design reviews of Real Housewives’ homes,” says Huerter. “[That’s] how it all really started, and it took off from there.”

He may have hooked his audience with his takes on reality star homes (which still feature in his rotation), but he has kept them coming back with a fresh perspective on design content that offers far more to sink your teeth into. Recent videos run the gamut from an explainer on the Jonathan Adler brand’s private equity–backed expansion, to how the Trump administration aims to influence federal architecture, and why tariffs recently caused RH stock to plummet (plus predictions on how trade policies will affect the rest of the industry).

Huerter holds an undergraduate degree in communications and advertising and a master’s in interior design from Parsons, and he suspects it’s this combined education that allowed him to hit a chord with his social media followers—now 126,300 on TikTok and 10,500 on Instagram, numbers accrued in the two short years since he began posting design-centric content. In the meantime, he has continued working in residential design—both for a New York firm and for his own budding studio—and is eager to see where his online success will take him next.

Ahead, Huerter shares how he established a social media niche by unpacking the design industry’s inner workings, crafting a design service package that capitalizes on his growing audience, and finding content inspiration that ignites online discussion.

Tricks of the Trade
When Huerter was starting out on social media, he tried his hand at making content in the DIY realm—a category that already had a robust online audience. In the process, he realized that despite the wide pool of interested viewers he found, that niche wasn’t an accurate reflection of his skills as a designer. Instead, he took the opposite tack—and dove into a niche that didn’t seem to have an existing audience among the general public.

“I started to share the inside of how interior design works as an industry and what the landscape looks like, because it can be very opaque for people who aren’t actually working in it,” he says.

A neutral-toned living room by Tommy Landen HuerterCourtesy of Tommy Landen Huerter

So far, that content has unpacked a wide range of industry inner workings: One recent video walks viewers through the process of ordering material and fabric samples, while another goes over designer fee structures and how the costs of design break down. Plus, Huerter says, this insider information is especially useful for the next generation of design clients.

“They don’t know the process and how it works, and it’s hard for some people to justify hiring a designer when there are so many online resources and ways you can figure these things out that people wouldn’t have been able to in the past,” he explains. “That’s where a lot of my content comes from: It’s almost a justification of, ‘This is what we’re doing here.’”

Meeting Clients Where they Are
For Huerter, social media remains a side job—a creative outlet and revenue stream that has to fit into his free time outside of his interior design work. Still, he’s managed to monetize his growing audience without letting go of his traditional design dreams. Part of that picture involves partnerships with home decor brands, while another concerns cultivating clientele on social media.

However, not all of the leads that come in via Huerter’s social media channels are viable. Many, for example, come in the form of clients who are looking to work with a designer for the first time but are not fully aware of what design services cost—a number that often exceeds their budgets. To meet them in the middle and build his studio’s body of work, he began offering smaller, hourly design packages (often with a minimum 20 hours of work).

“It’s more of a consulting project, as opposed to the more traditional, [full-service] design. It’s more people who want to work with me—they want my help designing things, they want to hop on calls and ask a million questions,” he says. “It’s a great way to grow a business, especially as a younger designer [when] you’re trying to get established and get things going.”

Be the Conversation-Starter
When it comes to social media fodder, Huerter tends to look for content with a timely hook—either a recent design-centric news article, or a shelter magazine spread that hasn’t been widely circulated yet. One of his inspiration-gathering rules of thumb is to look outside of social media for interesting tidbits, a strategy that often sets him apart from other creators in the field.

“With interior design content specifically, a lot of the time it’s people just sharing things that are beautiful, which is amazing—that’s why we all do what we do, because we want to make beautiful spaces and beautiful things,” he says. “But I think as far as engagement on your content, that will only get you so far.”

Often, Huerter points out, beautiful content may prompt a user to like a photo or video, but their engagement stops there. To keep their attention, he recommends generating content that sparks a conversation. “What really gets an audience growing is if you get someone to [reflect on] a question your content has them thinking about: What does that mean? How does that look? Would I do this? Or, having [the content] be something they want to share with someone else.”

While designers are great at capturing their spaces and sharing them, Huerter finds that they often need to develop their skills in conveying how they bring a space to life and the value they bring to clients who sign on to work with them. “A lot of times, designers are telling stories through the things they create, but it doesn’t always translate as well to a media platform,” he says. “It’s really important to not only share what you’ve created and designed, but also share your expertise, and tell the story of your expertise. It really interests people, in my experience.”