When interior designer Christina Higham found her first client via Instagram, she knew she was onto something. Higham, the owner San Francisco-based Sun Soul Style, cut her professional teeth in tech as a marketing and PR executive for a mobile advertising startup called Fetch. That experience keyed her into the potential of a platform like Instagram as a business tool, but it wasn’t until years later that she saw what the app could do for her own pursuits.
The customer in question was looking at a sconce on West Elm’s website. It was the sort innocuous clicking around that we all do on home furnishing sites, imagining how that coffee table from CB2 or that funky chair from Ikea would look in that vacant spot in the living room. Interior design is a nearly $10 billion business, and advertiser spending on Instagram is set to hit nearly $7B, up from $3.64B in 2017. Design companies also know they have a captive audience, and have concentrated on growing their follower counts as a play for direct advertising. West Elm has 1.8M followers, Ikea has 1.7M, Crate and Barrel 1.3M. They all know social media is another lever to pull when it comes to transforming browsers into buyers, and they’re doing what they can to ratchet up those conversion numbers.
But back to the sconces. Like a lot of brands, West Elm provides a feed of people who have tagged given items on Instagram so you can see how they look in real people’s homes rather than in the well-manicured, perfectly lit ersatz homes of West Elm’s photo studio.
One of those tagged photos was from Higham, who had bought the same sconce months earlier. Higham was working as a professional designer, but her clients had come from word of mouth–this was the first time someone had reached out via Instagram.”It was just someone local who said, ‘Oh, this girl is in San Francisco, I really like her style.’ And that’s how we started working together,” Higham told Fast Companyover the phone from her offices in San Francisco. “It wasn’t a huge project, but it felt really good. I was like, wow, tagging and doing all this social media—there’s a real benefit to this.”
In the years since, Instagram has become a central part in how Higham finds clients and builds her brand. She estimates that 40% of her business comes from Instagram, and says that the social media platform serves as a way to centralize her archive and inspirations, and showcase her evolution as a designer.
“It’s democratized design in a way,” Higham said. “It’s made people feel that anyone can be a designer because they have all of these things at their fingertips.”