Michelle Gage was several years into what she thought was her dream job when she realized she wasn’t in the right place. After studying interior design at Virginia Tech and securing a coveted internship at Anthropologie’s headquarters in Philadelphia, she’d spent her postgrad years climbing the corporate ladder at the retailer. Eventually, she began to see that her future goals were taking a different shape.
“I started to think, ‘Whose job in the company do I want? Do I need to switch departments? Do I need to dip my toes into some other area of the business?’” Gage tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of Trade Tales. “There really wasn’t a great fit for that, because it’s not an interior design firm.”
Without a solid plan in place, Gage resigned from her position and began taking on freelance work—everything from writing for shelter magazines to taking gigs on now-defunct design platform Homepolish, which helped her develop a pipeline of projects that would allow her to establish her own firm in 2017. In those early days, Gage poured everything she had into the budding business, taking an approach that pushed her firm forward with a rush of momentum—but left Gage nearing a point of total exhaustion.
To keep the firm (and herself) afloat, she embarked on a journey of transforming her business, putting in place the high-level hires and back-end structure necessary to bring the firm more sustainable success—which reignited Gage’s passion for design—in the years since.
“I came from a world where there were many departments that ran the business, and [suddenly in my own firm] I was the finance department and the photography department and client services and purchasing and HR. I was every department, and I wasn’t enjoying it anymore,” she says. “From that point forward, I set a lot of processes and systems and boundaries in place to make sure that not only myself, but my team, continues to enjoy it.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Gage shares the book that transformed her approach to leadership, the benefits of hiring a brand manager and how she educates clients on the costs of design.
Crucial insight: Gage works best with clients who are comfortable trusting the firm’s expertise, though that doesn’t mean she’ll count out those who have a harder time relinquishing control. In that respect, her strategy is to open the floor to feedback during specific windows throughout the design process—a system that prevents client overreach and ultimately protects the firm’s time. “It’s almost like we’re getting their permission along the way to proceed with the design, and that’s where they have their way in, and they feel like they are a part of the process, because they absolutely are,” she says. “I tell them all the time, ‘I’m going to show you things. If you don’t like them, you will not hurt my feelings.’ That’s how we get their permission along the way, so that we’re limiting revisions.”
Key quote: “You hear [relationship adages] like, ‘You can’t expect your romantic partner to be everything,’ and [similarly, in the design business] you can’t expect one designer to know how to do every single aspect of this very complex and complicated business. There are so many things I trust my team to do well., That’s not to say they’re perfect or that mistakes don’t happen, but there would be way more mistakes if I was the one doing everything.”
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