When designer Emily Finch made the decision to start her own firm, she found herself struggling to find a foothold. Luckily, her big break coincided with the publication of a book that would come to define her early career: Kim Kuhteubl’s Branding + Interior Design.
Going it alone for the first time can be a daunting task. For interior designers, the decision to start your own firm is difficult enough—the question of how to make a name for yourself is another undertaking entirely. Emily Finch found a resource for navigating those growing pains at just the right time in her career. The San Francisco–based designer had gone through what she called “a Goldilocks situation,” working at three firms of differing sizes before deciding in late 2015 that she was ready to take what she had learned and start her own design business. “When I went off on my own, I didn’t know many people in the Bay Area,” she recalls. “I was prepared to eat canned beans for a year because I thought it was going to be really hard to convince anyone to pay me to do this.”
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