We’re continuing our designer spotlight series with our next featured SideDoor user, and we have so much great content to share with you!
Each month, we’ll highlight a different SideDoor designer so you can get to know our family of users, learn about how they’ve each found success using SideDoor. We hope this provides inspiration for your own continued success in your design businesses!
To wrap up each month, we’ll put on a conversational Q&A format SideDoor University hosted by our featured SideDoor superstars.
This week we’re excited to introduce Palm Desert, California based designer, Patricia Lockwood, founder of the award winning design firm Design Vision Studio.
Ready to dive in? Here’s our conversation:
CONVERSATION
SideDoor: Patricia, welcome! I’m so excited to introduce you to our SideDoor community! First up, we want to know who you are. Tell us a little about yourself, your design business, and where you call home.
Patricia: Indian Wells California is where I live, and my studio (Design Vision Studio) is in Palm Desert, two and a half miles away, and I'm here seven days a week because I love what I do! My tagline is Brave, Bold and Beautiful—hence the Mohawk—and I'm trying to save the world from vanilla.
SideDoor: That’s fantastic! Oh my gosh, so important. [For the reader—since we’re not live—Patricia is wearing oversized, bold black and white striped glasses, a stylish mohawk, and sits in front of a loud, funky floral wallpaper—so incredibly on brand!]. So, when it comes to design, style, or some other aspect of your business—what makes you unique?
Patricia: So I consider myself a design entrepreneur, not necessarily a designer, because I love—I mean literally—everything about running a business. I almost like running the business more than design at this point. It's all self-taught, no fancy degree in business or marketing. All these experts are telling me to “do this and do that”, and I just have found a lane of being authentic and doing my best.
It's the kind of thing where I want to design a business that I want to work in. And I've figured out that SideDoor has been a big part of that!
SideDoor: That’s amazing! So many folks have an idea about what a designer’s business “should” look like. But it sounds like you’ve really carved out something unique to you! I’ll circle back on the SideDoor piece in a bit, but we’re curious, how would you describe the clientele you work with and what kinds of services do you offer to them?
Patricia: Well obviously, the best relationships between clients and designers are trust. It’s like if you wanted to be a stylist, and the client looks at the outfit on the hanger and they go, “No, no, I don't like that.” But they haven't tried it on! And if you've ever worked with a professional stylist, they shove it in your chest and go, “Try it on.” And they do, and the client goes, “Oh my gosh!” They all want a makeover, but they all want to do things the same way, so I just try to push just a little bit of “what it could be”. Try it on, consider this as a whole, and when they do listen? It’s magic, and that’s what I’m addicted to. I’m addicted to them telling me five years later, “I haven’t changed a thing! I love my house!” The whole aim of my platform is to help clients design with confidence.
SideDoor: What great illustration. I love that you help clients step outside their comfort zone in a fun and confident way. And just for fun, what’s a fun fact about you, maybe that has nothing to do with design, that you might like to share with our community?
Patricia: Well, I've been doing this for 24 years after retiring as a police officer, so that’s a fun tidbit, and also, I'm addicted to pickleball—like crazy addicted—so I come in most of the time before 6:00am, work the morning, and then I take off between 8:00 and 11:00 almost every day so I can work on my pickleball!
SideDoor: What a fascinating career shift, and I love that—it’s so important to make space to do the things that keep us energized. It’s been so great getting to know you, and we can’t wait to talk more about your business insights next week. Thanks for being a valuable member of the SideDoor community!
Next week we’ll be talking to Patricia specifically about some best practices when it comes to business processes, so stay tuned for that!
If you want to follow along with Patricia’s design work, you can find her website here, as well as her social media profiles on Instagram, Houzz profile, and Facebook.
And watch out for our schedule announcement of the SideDoor University episode with our very own featured designer for this month, Patricia Lockwood. We can’t wait to learn together!
