To-The-Trade S3E17 Stop Selling Me: Sharon Sherman on What Designers Want from Brands and Showrooms

Sharon Sherman of Thyme and Place Design has 40-plus years of experience across interior design and kitchen and bath, and that dual perspective gives her an unusually clear view of what's broken among designers, showrooms, and brands, and what actually works. The episode digs into a gap that's been widening since COVID. Clients are changing. Showrooms are closing. Brands that want the designer market often don't understand what that market actually needs. Sharon is direct: brands spend heavily on events and PR that completely miss designers, then blame the design community for being unsupportive. What designers want, she says, is to be welcomed and inspired, not sold to. They want solutions that improve projects and make businesses more profitable. She illustrates the dysfunction with a personal story. She visited a company's showroom repeatedly over several years before placing her first $45,000 order. Her rep never once reached out. The rep finally appeared after multiple large orders had already been placed. The showroom had benefited from her loyalty. The brand had no relationship with her at all. Her own approach is intentional. About 25 accounts across furniture, flooring, wall covering, and accessories, not a hundred. Deep relationships that go both ways: her showroom contacts know her well enough to advise her clients in her absence, and to tell her when a material won't work before she specifies it. She credits those relationships with saving her from costly mistakes, from wrong seaming placement on countertops to finding the right specialized installer for a gym floor. The "dinner plate" analogy she offers is one of the episode's most practical frameworks. Large vendors for core products, local showrooms for regional sourcing, and one or two specialty partners for the pieces that matter most. Managing that mix on purpose, rather than by default, is a business decision. On direct purchasing, her view is nuanced. Better margins are real, but only if the infrastructure supports it: receiving relationships, purchase volume that makes the brand care, and the capacity to absorb what goes wrong. For many solo designers, the showroom relationship is the more profitable choice once all the hidden costs are factored in. She closes with a prediction: the industry is dividing into conveyor belt design and what she calls painterly design. One fills spaces efficiently. The other curates them intentionally. The right clients, the right vendors, and the right relationships will determine which side of that divide each designer ends up on.