Why This Missouri Designer Reinvents the Wheel for Every Project

Original article posted at Business of Home by Kaitlin Petersen.

St. Louis–based Amie Corley tells us why she stopped doing one-room projects, how she engages clients’ imagination in the design process, and why she always maintains a little mystery in her design plan.

How did you transition from decorating for your friends to launching a firm?

I ended up meeting the editor of a local home magazine who came and took pictures of my house and put me on the cover in 2009. The client inquiries started rolling in, and I just went with it. I faked it ’til I made it.

How has the business grown since then?

I feel like my background in science makes me extremely organized, which helps with the business side. Our clients love that we have a more structured approach. I worked by myself until 2011, when I had my daughter and realized I needed technical help. There’s only so much you can do as a decorator when you’re getting inquiries for renovations and larger-scale projects, and I knew I couldn’t do that part on my own. So in 2011, I hired my first employee—a design assistant—and it was freedom. It made me realize how much you can offload what you don’t like to someone else.

Since then, I’ve always had either two or three employees—never more, because we work out of the carriage house behind my house. I never dreamed of scaling this into something really big. Instead, we love digging in: fewer clients, deeper relationships, and better, highly detailed projects. We rethink the wheel for each client, which some people hate to do, but I try to never repeat, and to make sure that what I’m doing for this project right now is not coming from the same place as the project I did last year.

What does that mean in practice? How do you push yourself to reinvent the wheel for every single project?

I spend a lot of time with my clients upfront to try to find out what they like, so that I’m not just pulling from what I like. A lot of my clients don’t read magazines, they’re not into the design scene, and it’s not something that they find important, but I love to hear their perspective anyway.

We start each project with a very hefty Pinterest board. I like to dive deep into my old design books and lay them all out over the studio table and peel back the layers of a different way to do stuff. For kitchens, I love to look at European kitchens and that pared-down approach—slab doors and great tile backsplash. You can pick apart these older designs and designs from other parts of the world and kind of translate them into something that people in St. Louis would like.

How do clients find you?

It’s all word-of-mouth. I have advertised a little bit—we’ve been in The Scout Guide here in St. Louis for the past few years, but I don’t think that’s how people find me. I get a lot of people going into clients’ houses who find me that way, or parents from my kids’ school—I’ve been lucky to be able to keep it close and tight. I like to have some kind of connection to people other than just the fact that they’re hiring me. It’s a very personal industry. I always tell my clients that when they hire me, we’re going to get married for a couple of years. If they don’t like the sound of my voice, they should not hire me, because they are going to hear it all the time.

How do you decide what you say yes to?

That’s been a very hard thing for me to learn because I am a pleaser. At the beginning, I said yes to everything. And that is one of the hardest lessons I ever learned.

About five years ago, we were doing 20 to 30 projects at a time, and I was wearing myself into the ground. I realized that for the majority of them, we weren’t even making much money. It’s all those little projects that drag the large projects down. If you could actually spend the time focusing on just those large ones, you wouldn’t have a financial need for the small ones.

Then, right after I turned 40, I had this epiphany. I was like, “I’m either going to die doing this, or I need to change the way I’m doing this.” I was so stressed out. As a business owner, you just want to make everybody happy—but trying to keep that enthusiasm and momentum going for that many projects was not happening. I genuinely care so much about these projects. For me, success 100 percent is return clients [who become] a client forever. We don’t really take on any new clients now—they’re all repeat clients who are redoing or moving—and I don’t do one-room projects anymore. It’s not profitable, it’s not fun for us, and it takes us away from the larger projects that need our attention.