But the interior design business, at least as a solo practitioner, has a dark side that outsiders rarely see.

"There's a lot of money involved," Laurel explains. "Getting things fixed often means doing it again or sometimes just giving them all their money back. So not only have I lost the sale, it's a big hit."

She tells me about a custom desk she had made. It filled an entire wall and was supposed to be beautiful. Instead, it arrived made from particle board, chipped, and three inches too shallow. The vendor made it twice. Both times wrong. Both times they took no responsibility. Laurel had to refund the entire job.

Then there were the clients themselves. Most were lovely, she's quick to say. Probably 98% of them. But the other 2% could make your life miserable.

"I learned this lesson in design school," she says. "If you have a funny feeling about a client in the beginning, get out as soon as you can. Just leave. Even though you think, we really need the money."

She tells me about one woman, a professional litigator in Manhattan, who became her most cautionary tale. Laurel saw the warning signs early, but she needed the work. The project went sideways. The client claimed back cushions on a custom sectional were different sizes (they weren't, the workroom confirmed; they were cut from the same pattern). The woman held onto a complaint about an ottoman for six months before bringing it up.

"It was just really awful," Laurel says. "So that's my biggest recommendation. If you think someone's bad news, you do not have to take the job."

The pivot to digital entrepreneurship

By 2012, Laurel had started a blog called Laurel Home, partly as a creative outlet and partly to share what she knew. She wrote twice a week about paint colors, room layouts, furniture, moldings, and all the details that go into making a room work. The early posts were mostly read by her mom.

Then two things happened.

First, she got serious about Pinterest. At the time, Pinterest was still a powerful way to get new eyes on content, and Laurel pinned aggressively. The traffic started flowing. Google noticed.

Second, she met the right people at the right time. They told her something that would change everything: grow your email list, create a digital product, and sell to the masses instead of working one-on-one.

"I go, okay," she says.

She surveyed her readers to find out what they actually wanted. Five product ideas were on the list. One of them, a shopping guide called Laurel's Rolodex, got 60% of the votes. It was a no-brainer.

She gave herself five and a half weeks to create it.

"I wanted to throw up because it's very tedious," she admits. "But I did it."

The launch of digital products



The night she launched, Laurel couldn't sleep. At 2 a.m., she just did it. Someone placed an order immediately. Then she spotted a mistake and had to fix it. Another hour passed. More orders. She went to bed.

When she woke up six hours later, she had about 30 orders. She'd made roughly $6,000.

The next day, she made another $6,000.

"And I went, oh my god, I have a thing," she says. "This is it."

The Rolodex is now in its 12th edition. It's grown to over 450 pages of sources, with tips, anecdotes, and links to hundreds of vendors. For designers selling digital products, it's essentially a college course worth of insider knowledge, priced far below what a single credit at the New York School of Interior Design would cost.

She followed it with more products: The Laurel Home Essential Paint Color Collection (144 Benjamin Moore colors, obsessively curated), the 333 Decorating Rules & Tips You Need to Know, a Six-Figure Income Blogger guide, and an Etsy shopping guide.

Each one gets lifetime updates. That's not a marketing gimmick. She actually goes through them every year, verifying links, adding new sources, removing ones that have gone out of business.

"It's a lot of work updating them," she says. "It's tedious."

The business model



Laurel's revenue now comes from three streams: digital product sales, affiliate marketing, and the blog itself.

The affiliate marketing happens through a weekly feature called Hot Sales, where she curates deals from her favorite home furnishings and fashion vendors. It works because she's spent years building trust with her audience.

"When I say I recommend something, it's either something I would buy for myself, and sometimes have, or for a client," she explains. "Or I found something really cool."

That trust is the secret, she believes. People don't just want a list of products. They want to know that someone with taste and experience has vetted each one.

Her affiliate revenue for November was up 125% year over year, largely because she pushed hard on holiday decorating content. "It's working," she says, "but it's a lot of work."

The digital product sales, meanwhile, have shifted over the years. She used to make well into six figures annually from products alone. That's changed as the market has evolved and more creators have entered the space. But the products still provide a foundation of revenue that doesn't require her to deal with vendors who make desks out of particle board.

What she knows now

After 13 years of blogging and nearly a decade of selling digital products, Laurel has a few things figured out.

First, the email list matters more than anything. She built hers with a free paint guide (a lead magnet before anyone called it that) and grew it through Pinterest traffic. At its peak, she had 41,000 subscribers. Technical issues with email providers have knocked that down to around 31,000, which frustrates her, but the list remains her primary asset.

"The whole email thing is just awful," she says, "because a lot of people get dropped because of spam bots who think I'm spamming them." It's a perpetual battle.

Second, the value has to be real. Her Rolodex isn't successful because it's cheap. It's successful because people who buy it actually use it to furnish their homes. She regularly gets photos from readers who decorated entire houses using only her blog and guides.

"I've had dozens of people write me," she says. "They say, I did my whole house just from reading your blog. And then they send me pictures and they're pretty good. I mean, they're really good."

Third, helping people is more satisfying than she expected. In design, you help one client at a time and deal with all the logistical nightmares that come with custom work. With digital products and a blog, you help thousands of people figure out paint colors and furniture placement and vendor selection, and nobody yells at you when the workroom doesn't follow instructions.

"I was so happy that I found a way out," she says. "I don't know how anybody does this business, at least as a solo practitioner."

The philosophy

When I ask Laurel about her design aesthetic, she lights up. She's a classicist, she says. Always has been. The things she loved when she started 40 years ago are the things she loves today.

What's interesting is how she learned to articulate it. Blogging forced her to examine her own process, to understand why certain things work and others don't.

"I realized that mostly what looks really great together are the colors that look great together in nature," she says. "Looking at nature. It could be a forest, flowers, the ocean. You can develop a whole color scheme from what God created. It's perfect."

She pauses.

"You ever say, oh, I'm in the forest, oh, those leaves are clashing? Never. Never. They never clash."

It's a simple insight, but it explains why her content resonates. She's not following trends or pushing the latest thing. She's teaching people to see what works by pointing at things that have always worked.

"My philosophy has always been and always will be about embracing all that is classic and classical," she writes on her site. "These are time-tested colors."

What's next

At nearly 70, Laurel is still publishing twice a week. She still updates her guides every November. She still curates Hot Sales every Friday. The business continues.

If she could tell herself something from five years ago, it would be to get better help. Training people is hard. Finding people who understand the intricacies of interior design sources is harder. But she knows she's left money on the table by trying to do too much herself.

"Part of that is probably just need to take the leap and find somebody who can help me," she says. "So if you have somebody helping you and they're just making your life easier, that's good. But they should also be bringing in more money by their being there."

It's a lesson many solo digital product sellers eventually learn. At some point, the constraint isn't ideas or audience. It's time.

For now, though, Laurel seems content with what she's built. When I ask what makes her happy, she doesn't talk about revenue.

"I walk around here and I go, I get to live here," she says about her Boston apartment, the one with the spiral staircase and the hand-painted Gracie wallpaper in the entry. "I mean, really. Every day."