Being an interior designer

After 11 years into the interior design business and designed celebrities' houses' such as the famous wrestler turned actor, The "Stone" and Former music mogul "Tummie" boy (I have to change the celebrities' names for confidentiality reason), what I have learned? alot, how much I have made? Not much! Why? because I had worked for somebody.

One thing I regret about entering this business is not knowing wealthies or having connections. I also blame myself for not being social or having "charisma". It seems like being a successful interior designer, the creativities and drawing skills are no longer necessary because many of the successful interior designers out there are either very social, talkative with lots of connections to the wealthies or very business savvy, they don't necessarily have any interior design education, credentials, creativities, or drafting skills, they only hire someone who has the design skills or background to work for them, and they claim all the credits and make all of the money. They pay very little to those real interior designers who did all the work, many of the senior level interior designers are making less than 50K/year but working like dogs. When their bosses published the projects on the magazines, those designers' names usually were not on there, so when the potential clients read the magazines, they came to the bosses if they want to have design work done for their houses or spaces.

Maybe it is for protecting their status quo or the sense of insecurity they have due to their own conciousness about how little they really know about the designs, those bosses usually divided the tasks for designers to do, some designers only do drawings, some do furniture /equipment purchasing, some do construction supervision, some do estimation, and some do bookkeeping or contract writing so they will never be able to learn the full procedures of interior design and know how to run the business. They also barely hire the interns because they simply just don't want to train their own future competitors. I don't blame their insecurity because they know anyone can easily take away their businesses just because the person who was born to the rich and has connections or who is business savvy.

I ask myself why interior design business is so screwed up? Unlike other businesses, a well known and famous doctor is well known and famous because of his/her great professional medical skills, a well known lawyer is well known because of his/her professional law related knowledge, a well known interior designer could just be a good businessman without knowing anything about interior design. Too many un-professionals lead the professionals in interior design field, no wonder we do not have the respect we deserve.

I met many very creative interior designers in this business who are just not very social or business savvy, they are usually introverted and quiet, but they shouldn't be punished for that! Why do they deserve to be enslaved by the businessmen and get paid with almost nothing? Why can businessmen hire interior designers and claim themselves interior designers but not interior designers hire businessmen to run their businesses and be called interior designers?! That is what ASID, NCIDQ, or IIDA really should do! To help those talented interior designers who do not know how to run business, who do not know rich people,  who do not have connections, or who are not good at socializing to be successful designers, the business owners, and prevent them from being design slaves hired by those fake designers who claim themselves interior designers but actually just bunch of businessmen.

Any of you out there who is looking for an interior designer to design your project, you absolutely have every right to go for those name brand interior designers who are actually just businessmen, but when you do that, please ask them to introduce you his/her entire design team and get to know those real interior designers work behind the scence and establish good working relationship with them. They might be the ones who would design your next projects with much lower price because you just helped yourself eliminating those "middle men".