To-The-Trade Episode Summary
Shannon Ggem of Ggem Design joined Laurie Laizure on To-The-Trade for Interior Design Community to talk about what happened when she handed her Instagram over for thirty days and stopped relying on finished photography to carry her marketing.
Start with the math problem every interior designer will recognize. In a strong year, you get maybe twenty good photos of a finished install. There are 365 days in the year. What happens on the other 345? Most designers either cycle the same twenty images or go quiet, and the thing potential clients actually want, which is a look at how the work gets made and why it costs what it costs, stays locked in the designer’s head.
Shannon had been running into that wall for a decade. She posted three times a week for ten years. She was not lazy about it, and she was not careless about it. She was doing what most designers do: post the beautiful finished work, add a filter, and hope something catches. Her honest assessment of the return: one new follower every three months, and she usually had to meet that person in real life at a trade show to get it.
So when Laurie asked her to be a private case study for a new content system, Shannon said yes and braced for a fire hose. This episode is the debrief on what happened over the next thirty days, recorded before IDC rolls the process out to the wider community.
The first change had nothing to do with strategy. Laurie told Shannon to drop the filters. Shannon loved the filters. She admits she was addicted to them. She also saw the numbers move the moment they came off. Laurie’s read on why is worth hearing in a year when AI-generated talking heads are flooding everyone’s feed. When a viewer suspects they are not looking at a real person, they leave.
The second change was scripting, and this is where Shannon pushed back hardest. Being told to be authentic and then handed a script feels like a contradiction. What convinced her was the comparison. Her scripted videos are cleaner, tighter, and free of the pauses and repetition she falls into when she talks off the cuff.
Laurie’s process is loose enough to survive contact with a real personality. Build a script with AI using your own talking points, drop it into the Notes app, edit it until it sounds like you, then paste it into the teleprompter in Edits, Instagram’s free editing app. Record one paragraph at a time. Delete the bad takes as you go so editing is just trimming good clips. Curate your photos before you open the app, not while you are in it.
Shannon’s most useful confession is about the times she went off script and reverted to her old habits. Those attempts took longer, performed worse, and she ended up doing it Laurie’s way in the end anyway. Her top two performing videos in the entire feed were made with zero makeup, wearing pajamas, in about ten minutes. The ones that felt like she had not worked hard enough were the ones that worked.
Underneath all of it sits a structure of eight content buckets, each with a job to do. The first is local authority, which for Shannon meant a video about a piece of Malibu architecture, a timely tile sale at a local maker’s showroom, and a local holiday post. The architecture video kept getting shared, because people who walk past that house wanted their friends to see it. That is what turns a designer into one of ours in a neighborhood.
Laurie also tracks what happens to a brand every time she features one: at minimum, 50 new followers, and sometimes 250. That is the mechanism behind real referral relationships with tile makers, showrooms, realtors, and trades. Making a video about someone else’s business is the most useful thing you can hand them, and it costs you ten minutes.
It is also the case for naming makers out loud. Clients do not know the names behind the furniture and lighting in their own homes, which means the industry has quietly made handcrafted goods anonymous instead of desirable. Shannon and Laurie make the argument that a named, understood, heirloom-quality piece stays in a family instead of going to the curb.
The conversation turns honest about harder material too. Shannon talks about posting on the subject of drawings, a dense topic she assumed nobody would care about, and finding that clients rebuilding after the fires care very much, because knowing there will be layers of drawings and multiple people to pay for them is the difference between feeling informed and feeling ripped off.
Laurie pushes further and suggests designers start publishing cost ranges. Both of them land on the same idea from different directions. The satisfying before-and-after reel is fun, and it needs a counterweight that says this took sixteen months and here is what it cost. Somebody has to be the one to say it, and designers are already saying it privately every day.
There is a genuinely good detour on emotional resistance. Shannon had been sitting on a story about her first career as an actress, specifically as a scream queen. The resistance disguised itself as a file management problem and cost her a night of sleep. The post was a hit. Her advice is to recognize the disguise, thank your brain, and fly through the cloud.
On the tactical side, the episode covers hooks in three forms: spoken, on-screen text, and audio, and it covers trial reels, which Shannon had never understood. One of her videos ran twice with two different titles and pulled 38,900 views on one and 19,800 on the other, all of it reaching people who did not already follow her.
Shannon and Laurie set goals they both thought were optimistic and cleared them, ending the month at 158,800 views and 990 new followers. The offline results are the ones worth noting: a licensing conversation, a solid referral, and two brands reaching out about paid collaboration, one of which happens to be supplying Shannon’s own bathroom renovation.
Shannon’s biggest takeaway is not a tactic. It is that she was overdoing it. Laurie put her on a timer, caught her spending too long, and kept repeating the point until it stuck. Getting the thought out is what matters, and a ten-minute post you actually publish beats a perfect one you do not. The episode closes on how to keep this sustainable during the weeks you have nothing left, using B-roll, scheduled posts, reposts of proven content, and one piece of footage cut several ways for several different purposes.
Join our “Build a Video Library Challenge”! For interior designers, every video is a chance to educate, answer questions, and remove uncertainty. Those videos keep working long after you publish them, introducing you to future clients every day.
https://interiordesigncommunity.com/build-video-library-challenge/
Learn more about Shannon Ggem’s work at shannonggem.com or follow along on Instagram.
Find IDC content more easily in Google
Set Interior Design Community as a preferred source in your Google settings and we’ll show up more often when you search. It takes less than a minute.
Add IDC as a preferred source →
Timestamp Guide
00:01 – Why IDC ran a private Instagram experiment with Shannon
03:10 – Ten years of posting, three followers, and a total retraining
05:43 – Dropping the filters and what the numbers did immediately
09:26 – The starting baseline and the goals Shannon thought were laughable
10:43 – Scripts first, then eight content buckets, starting with local authority
12:44 – What the local videos did: the Wave House, a tile sale, and shares
15:31 – Why designers resist scripts, and what changed Shannon’s mind
16:32 – The toolkit: Edits, teleprompter, green screen, one paragraph at a time
19:11 – No makeup, pajamas, and the top two videos in the feed
22:20 – What happens to a brand when a designer makes a video about them
34:38 – One video, two titles, and how trial reels reach new people
45:50 – Where the numbers landed
52:41 – Emotional resistance and the scream queen post
1:06:24 – Real outcomes: a licensing deal, a referral, and two paid collaborations
1:08:19 – Repurposing footage and building a bank of content you can lean on
Latest Podcast:
