09: Choosing the Right Designer

What should you do when you don’t love the concept your designer has created? How much feedback is too much? And what happens when you’re having trouble separating your preferences from what’s best for your audience? These are just a few of the areas on which Emily Baird shares her knowledge with us.

Emily is a luxury designer specializing in wedding invitations and small business branding. Her work has been nationally recognized in Martha Stewart Weddings, The Knot, Style Me Pretty, and many more publications.

On this episode, Kim and Emily talk about:

Deciding when to leap into business ownership full time;
Important lessons learned from working for someone else;
The best way to figure out how your style fits with a designer;
How designers are trained to receive feedback;
Giving direction to your designer without copying someone else’s approach; and
Life lessons about finishing strong.

Stick around until the end when Emily and Kim share some of the most cringe-worthy moments they’ve ever experienced.

QUOTABLES

“It’s always about how you finish. No matter what happened on the inside – whether I was staying up all night to finish a job or had to reorder a job because it was the wrong size – I just made sure to finish well.” – Emily Baird

“I cried my way through my first graphic design class. It was really, really hard.” – Emily Baird

“I never wanted to be in a position when I ended up hating my business because of a financial problem. If I hated it I wanted it to be because of the work itself, not because I couldn’t afford to do it.” – Emily Baird

“The big thing about the luxury market is people aren’t going to send business your way if they don’t trust you or haven’t seen your work.” – Emily Baird

“If I hadn’t learned how to receive feedback I don’t know how I would’ve gone out on my own. Because I think I would have always been offended. And in this work there’s no room for getting offended.” – Emily Baird

“Designing is way less about the actual design and more about the research you put in to get there.” – Emily Baird

“I vacillate between wanting to go all in with my personality and appealing to my audience’s sense of what they’re looking for as a business.” – Kim Wensel

“If you’re going to hire a designer, you’ve got to do your very best to figure out why you do or don’t like something. Put your best effort into figuring out the why behind your feelings.” – Emily Baird

“I can count on my hand the number of wedding invitations that have gone out exactly as I designed them on the first proof. The job of the designer is to design something, figure out what you like and what you don’t, and go back and revise it. Literally that is their job.” – Emily Baird

“Do not brand to a trend.” – Emily Baird