794: Renee Biery: Do Clients Know You Can Handle Project Management?

Today With Renee Biery:

Welcome to A Well-Designed Business. Today I am chatting with Renee Biery, owner of  deVignier Design, Inc. and Only Girl On the Jobsite podcast. Renee works in restoration as well as new construction and she wanted to share with my listeners how renovation management is a stable income for interior designers throughout the year, as procurement and decorating ebbs and flows per job. A lot of takeaways here. Enjoy!

Pick It Apart

[3:50] Renee describes the scope of renovation management in her business.

[14:26] Renee shares how she changed the initial conversations with her clients, so that they would consider her for renovation management as well.

[22:53] Renee shares another way we can position ourselves to clients as their one stop shop.

[32:40] Renee gives us tips as designers on how we can confidently show up at a typically male dominated job site.

LuAnn Nigara and Renee Biery's Ah-Ha Moments

“Many designers are doing renovation management, but don’t necessarily lead with it in their marketing.” - Renee Biery

 

“There’s a lot of different people with different skill sets that are needed to complete the project, but they don’t have overlapping skills. A designer can add to that and elevate any project.” - Renee Biery

 

“View yourself as an equal on the team. You are not above and you are not below.” - Renee Biery 

 

“In order to be taken seriously, you have to show up seriously.” - LuAnn Nigara

More About Renee Biery:

Renée deVignier Biery, ASID, is an interior designer based in Wilmington, Delaware. She is a graduate of the New York School of Interior Design, one of the country’s oldest conservatory interior design programs, earning a degree with distinction in 1994 as an Associate in Applied Science in Interior Design. Biery is formally trained in practical interior architecture with advanced technical and rendering proficiency. Her credentials include NCIDQ board licensing as a professional member of the ASID, the design industry’s highest certification. 

 

For Biery, design is a lifelong calling. It is a throughline of home life, from the traditional American houses of the Delaware Valley, to her training and professional experience in the design world of New York, and back again to her roots in Wilmington. Across this map of influences, design has given Renée the way to celebrate a sense of place that is both local and original. 

 

Renée deVignier Biery was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, home to the Winterthur Museum among many important and historic residences and gardens. Good design was always in her surroundings, “a common language of big rambling homes filled with proper antiques,” she explains. She drew her inspiration early from a number of grandly formal old houses belonging to members of her own family in Virginia and especially from her two grandmothers—one, a southern, Virginia lady with an eye for cutting-edge New York and European fashion, and the other, a social worker who had a talent for understanding people deeply. Those qualities combine in Biery’s approach to design. She puts people and their practical needs first. She aims to create work that will be lasting and meaningful. She views tradition with an edge but also with a natural, truly southern civility.

 

During and following her schooling, Biery worked in the design field in New York. She began in 1993 as an associate in the legendary Lexington Avenue boutique of designer Charlotte Moss. She spent several years as a senior designer in the firm of Barbara Hauben Ross, a well-known New York designer who specializes in refined, luxury Art Deco interiors. During this tenure Biery honed her skill not only in historical and architectural renovation, but also, specifically, in the edited simplicity of early modern color, shape, and structure. The experience has given her a quietly pared-down viewpoint to balance more embellished, traditional environments.

 

Biery returned permanently to Wilmington in 2000 and established her own firm, deVignier Design, Inc. She works in restoration as well as new construction, and remains committed to the personal attention of a studio practice where she is fully involved from inception to installation with every assignment. “These are people who are sharing their lives with me, who will often spend a number of years with me on a project,” she says. “If I do my job right, the relationship is as lasting as the work, and the resulting house will look like the homeowners, not me.”

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Other Shows Mentioned:

#16- Charles Pavarini: Behind the Scenes of the Architectural Digest Design Show 2016

#305- Elizabeth Scruggs: The Things I Learned From A Well-Designed Business.

#380- Circle Design Studio: Architect & Interior Design Firm: John & Theresa Dorlini

A Big Thank You to Today's Sponsor:

Mydoma studio, the project management tool for you to organize your communication with your team, your clients and your trades. Invoices, proposals, presentations, project milestones all in one place. See it for yourself- go to mydomastudio.com/awelldesignedbusiness