During Spring Market day at New York City's Design and Decoration Building, over 100 designers flocked to the Holly Hunt showroom for a candid conversation between Business of Home's editor in chief Kaitlin Petersen and Cheryl Eisen of Interior Marketing Group. The two discussed how Eisen built her business from a one-woman operation into the largest luxury home design and marketing firm in the United States, now an 80-person, predominantly female team.
Sharing tales from the scrappiness of her early staging projects (IKEA and Craigslist finds) to sprawling warehouses with luxury furniture for rent, Eisen also answered questions about how designers can work to cultivate their own staging business, and the pain points and hard lessons she learned along the way.
"Cheryl impressed all of us with how she grew IMG from a one-woman show into a powerhouse staging and design firm," says Petersen. "She was incredibly open about the logistics of running the business, how she pursued a diversified mix of revenue streams to effectively recession-proof the company—and most of all, how she has embraced the power of saying yes to new opportunities every step of the way."
Images by Kevin Lau
