Sarah Lewis + CanvasRebel — Sarah Noel Interiors

I had the enormous honor of being interviewed by CanvasRebel. We talked mission, business strategy, and the SNI origin story. Check it out!

Meet Sarah Lewis

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Lewis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
**Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?**
When I launched Sarah Noel Interiors in 2012, I was surprised to learn how few resources were available to the industry at large. There were as many business models as there were stagers. I desperately sought out education, courses, and mentors only to learn that the courses available were antiquated with little connection to a modern aesthetic or entrepreneurship. The mentors I sought out were solopreneurs with little interest in fostering their competition. So rather than starting with any formality, I soaked in all I could from afar from legends like Meredith Baer and other bi-coastal stagers.
What I found was that staging was still unfamiliar to the general Denver metro area. But I knew if luxury costal towns were having success, Denver wouldn’t be too far behind. We were already seeing the influx of California, New York and Chiacgo migrants that has only grown in strength in the last decade. For the few that had experience with staging, we were fighting hard to prove the value of the service and still losing out on 75% of the jobs we went for. We would work on a tiny budget (because who who would pay for something they didn’t see value in?), creating a less than stellar product, leaving their home without the proper impact, possibly sitting for a long period, confirming their initial belief and the cycle continued.

I began seeking out conversations with Realtors, established stagers, and industry partners with intense curiosity using it for my own arsenal in client conversations determined to help homeowners fully understand the value of what staging could really do. I figured if I could create the need, the rest would follow. At the same time, HGTV helped to set a new precedent and widespread eagerness for a pretty home to sell and SNI began picking up speed.

Then, once we had gained enough traction and we were booking a majority of our potential projects, we switched our focus to transparency through education. We stressed up-front communication, easy to understand staging costs, operations, and market and style trends. We’re now in a market that craves unique, boundary-pushing aesthetics though there’s always a gap between the buyer wants and what the real estate and development industry thinks will sell and I’m always aiming to close the gap.

Transparency in staging and design is still a mountain to conquer specifically in an industry where there is still little consistency in business models and pricing. With that in mind, we developed a publicly available (and completely proprietary) Staging Calculator allowing clients to get a handle on the investment easily and accurately while they’re still in the discovery phase of listing their home.

Transparent education and communication creates trust, elevates the industry as a whole, and breeds more business owners with strong foundations which keeps the industry credible and valid – that’s our ultimate goal.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

SNI began in 2012 on a complete whim. I was a nanny interested in design but had only a marketing degree and no formal design education. I had applied with several design firms but lacked any of the necessary requirements to even initiate an interview. While working as a nanny, I came across staging through while Googling jobs. I had no idea what it was, just that it was design related and there were zero requirements to start.

I certainly didn’t intend on being a business owner but my boyfriend at the time (now husband) said, “if you can’t find what you want, just create it”. My first job came from an amazing realtor who gave me a chance even though I had no clue was I what doing and I still can’t believe I talked the homeowner into writing me a check that day. But then it was up and running!

I started to see an opening in the luxury market and handed out flyers to luxury brokerages and heard back from one that brought me into some incredible jobs. My clientele shifted into mostly $1.5m – $10m and I developed a skillset and proficiency in those markets to better cater to them.

Those experiences curated my aesthetic to be more well-scaled, elevated and purposeful. We create functional spaces dependent on our Realtors partners to determine their most likely buyer and develop the space around that avatar. We work mostly in Denver city neighborhoods and the buyers we encounter prefer unique, interesting designs avoiding the “staging formula” altogether. Our market knowledge, customer service and design aesthetic mean our designs are recognizable and always unearthing the best the home has to offer.

We thrive on color and scale to latch on to the underlying personality of the home. We do this by offering staging services that include:

Consultations to evaluate and edit a homeowner’s current furniture, paint and lighting
Partial Staging to supplement their current pieces
Vacant Staging for builders, developers and homeowners

Over time, we branched into Interior Design services to cater to our clientele as they purchase their home. We now provide:

Builder Finish Packages
Full Service Interior Design

I’m a huge fan of processes and systems. We’ve created all of our processes from scratch over 10 years of learning, tweaking and perfecting, which I’m incredibly proud of. It’s become a necessity as we touch 200+ homes each year and have staged over $1 billion in listings and developing a solid system to track their details and metrics has been a tremendous feat on its own.

Our clients enjoy transparent pricing, seamless processes, project management, regular communication and clearly defined expectations. This is particularly important as we manage full home furnishings and management for our Full Service Design clients. Their weekly updates keep them apprised of all the happenings in their space. This caters beautifully to our second homeowner clientele who have primary homes across the country. They receive a gorgeous design package tied up in a nice bow without ever having to check in or inspect the painter, flooring, or tile tradesman. It’s very hands-off for those who enjoy a well-designed home without wanting to be hands-on.

Fine tuning our product and clientele means we can remove the scarcity mindset that creeps into a business owner’s mind. We now have the luxury of fully operating from a place of providing our best quality on each project because we aren’t trying to tackle every job that comes our way. We only want to provide a high level of service to the clients that will most appreciate what we can do for them.

My hope is that this attitude is infectious and can assist in creating a better, more welcoming camaraderie within the staging and design industry and allows us to sharpen each other’s skillsets. Open conversations raise the tide for our entire community.