Utilizing Personal Projects as a Marketing Channel with Jean Stoffer and Grace Start

Season 10 of The Interior Collective Podcast is brought to you by Materio.

Welcome back to The Interior Collective. I'm your host, Anastasia Casey, and today two of my favorite people are back.

Jean Stoffer joined us in Season 5 to talk about building a family legacy in design, and it was such an impactful conversation. If you have not listened to it, go back and start there. Today we are picking up where we left off, but going somewhere completely new.

Jean and Grace were also keynote speakers at Design Camp last fall, and if you were in the room that day you already know what an extraordinary conversation it was. It’s a privilege to have them back.

Here is what I have been thinking about since we last spoke. The Madison, the 10,000 square foot Greek Revival home that started as a flip and ended with Jean and her husband moving in, is widely credited as the moment that put Jean Stoffer Design on the international map. The photos went viral on Instagram, the Magnolia Network came calling. And everything changed. Jean is now doing it again with the Reeds Lake house, a major renovation being documented on YouTube as a monthly series. And Grace has built her own deeply engaged following by sharing the story of the Log Cabin, her family home that started as a vacation rental, across The Established Home, Instagram, and YouTube.

What is fascinating to me is that neither of them is doing this casually. There is a real multi-channel strategy behind how these personal projects are shared. Today we are digging into this concept, because personal projects may be the most underutilized marketing tool available to designers at every stage.