Interiors: The Benefit of Working with Repeat Clients

Photo of Glassdoor Ohio; by Francisco Lopez de Arenosa

We’re lucky to have a number of repeat clients that come to Valerio Dewalt Train for their new interiors projects.

On each project we do for a given company, we’re able to bring together what we know from working with them, and others, previously with new aspirations and strategies. For example, we’ve learned that a growing startup company may want their interior design to be fairly experimental, as our clients are open to trying different ideas for configuring workspaces and establishing a strong brand identity. For a long-established financial company, each workplace location needs to convey the firm’s stability and experience. For every project, we are adapting a design for different offices while making it clear that each office is a member of the same design family. All the while, as with any job that VDT takes on, we pride ourselves on providing long-standing support to our valued clients and teams year after year.

Photo of Glassdoor Chicago; by Tom Harris

Collaboration

As members of Valerio Dewalt Train’s interior design team, we work closely with our architects and with Media-Objectives (M-O), the firm’s in-house experiential design & branding studio. What makes VDT unique is our blended team approach - our entire project team wears many different hats throughout its very collaborative process. M-O takes the lead in terms of branding, and we work closely with them to coordinate primary brand colors, feature walls, secondary color accents, lighting and a unique personality for the space, so the design clearly conveys the client’s culture and desired look and feel each time they return with a new project. This trickles down from architectural moves, to wall graphics, to millwork detailing, furniture textiles and even accessories. We’re involved in the initial visioning sessions with the architecture studio, collaborate on the space planning, and take the lead in guiding clients through the furniture and finish selections. It’s a fully integrated process and we value the coordination with our team in-house and with our clients.

In addition to creating great relationships with fascinating people, one of the many wonderful things about having a repeat client is that you both can continue the work that you’ve been doing to better the company over several years. You can basically pick up the conversation where you left off: “In the previous project, what we liked was A, B, and C, so we want to keep those elements. What we want to change for this new project is X, Y, and Z.” Over time, this builds a solid level of trust, ongoing communication and knowledge base.

Unique Interiors

Take Glassdoor for example, we’ve undertaken several of their workplace projects. They have their own marketing and branding team to guide the company’s culture and overall look and feel. For a new project, their team might send us a package with the branding mission statement and colors, and then here at VDT, our team works to develop how those ideas might come into play for different areas of the new workplace. The interior design team will then pull together the materials palette and highlight the primary and secondary colors, establish how the materials palette will transition from an architectural and FF&E standpoint, and identify how that impacts the branding and fits into the architecture. The layout and types of amenities provided may be quite similar from one office to the next, but we’re continuously working with Glassdoor to evaluate and optimize their spaces. This is also all while creating a unique interior for each office so the space feels welcoming, thoughtful and personalized. We present all this to the client for reaction and continue this process repeatedly until we get to the final decisions.

The Process

With all of our clients, repeat or new, we kick-off each project with a visioning session. There is a lot of back and forth here—some of it is verbal, and some of it is visual. We then create several giant “moodboards” of different inspiration images that convey various takes on the client’s ideas. We’ll bring this board to a client meeting, hand out a number of green and red dots, and ask the clients to put a green dot on images they like and a red dot on ones they don’t. This kind of exercise really helps us find out what they’re responding to and helps inform our overall design direction.

Once a project is done, we follow up to get feedback from the client on how the design is working in practice. Most of the feedback is positive, but there are always some lessons learned, which we apply to the next project for that client, as well as to related projects for other clients. For example, we’ve gotten feedback that certain conference room lighting fixtures haven’t worked well for those with sensitivity to artificial lighting. Now we highly recommend dimmable lighting in all conference rooms and tell clients that certain light fixtures, as beautiful as they may be, may not be the best for a particular location in the office. If the client really wants to specify them anyway, we review what needs to be coordinated to make the lighting comfortable for the employees to avoid potential future problems.

Lasting Relationships

With interior design, the details really matter. It’s what you’re sitting on, what you’re looking at, where you’re getting your work done, every single day. We want each day to be a peak experience for those who interact with our built environments. And for our repeat clients, that’s what we want from each project, too. Our clients, both new and existing, become an extension of our office - we care about our work and we think that’s why our clients have returned to work with us time and again. We’re very fortunate to have built lasting relationships with a number of our clients and look forward to each new collaboration with them.

Authors

BlogBrandon McGivernSeptember 14, 2021interior design