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podcast | Jan 29, 2025 |
Jenna Chused on embracing risk in order to grow

By the time she launched her own firm, Jenna Chused had grown accustomed to helping other creatives launch their businesses. First, she joined Amy Crain in launching home and design shopping magazine Room, putting her past experiences as a stylist to work in a new category. Looking to switch gears again, Chused left to help Christiane Lemieux create decor and bedding brand DwellStudio—a journey that concluded when the brand was sold to Wayfair in 2013. Not long after, she decided it was time to take a chance on her own entrepreneurial dreams.

“That had always been my experience: working at these start-ups as the number two and making things happen,” Chused tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “I was like, ‘You know what—I’m going to start my own thing. I’m ready. I want it to be about me. I don’t want to be the second line anymore. I want to be an interior designer.”

With a few clients she’d picked up from her time at DwellStudio, and a former team member who would soon become her design assistant, she officially launched her Brooklyn-based interiors firm, Chused & Co., in 2015. The early days largely consisted of Chused writing her own rule book for how an interior designer should work. Literally. She wrote down principles such as the ideal spacing between a sofa and a coffee table or the proper lengths for window treatments. Once she found her rhythm, she discovered a hurdle that proved even more daunting: investing the necessary resources to expand her firm—and then sustaining that growth.

“That’s what I was always afraid of: building something and then not having the business to support it,” she says. “It’s always so scary. You have to grow and hire people and get bigger spaces—and do all of these things to get bigger projects and to keep going in the direction you want to go in. That’s risk. I just had to get used to taking risks.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Chused shares how she honed her marketing efforts to achieve better exposure and overcame a fear of delegation in order to grow, and talks about the real project photography expenses required to get published today.

Clueless when it comes to Instagram? On February 19, designer-turned-marketer-extraordinaire Emma Tessler will teach on how to tackle this essential app with confidence and clarify, starting with simple ways to craft a strong online presence that instantly conveys your brand identity and strength. Click h ere to learn more and remember, workshops are free for BOH Insiders.    

Crucial insight: Chused built her business by converting friends and professional contacts into future clients. As the industry has evolved, however, so has her firm—which means adopting new methods of lead generation. “I think sometimes people don’t even want to share their designer, because they don’t want their friend to have the same look they have,” she says. “I don’t think word-of-mouth is as strong of a tool for getting new business. I think it’s [more about] getting people to see your imagery, whether on Instagram or getting people to your website or pinning your images [on Pinterest].”

Key quote: “There was a huge learning curve of, ‘How do we get our ideas across? What does our mood board look like? Do we need to do 3Ds? How are we going to present it to someone so they know what we’re talking about?’ That’s always been my biggest thing—every time we do a presentation, we always do something different and better.”

This episode was sponsored by Ethan Allen and The Shade Store. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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