I’m a tiny bit late with an end of year review but I thought I’d do some sort of review anyway! I actually meant to do one at the end of November to mark three years since going freelance and the launch of my new website but a) I but didn’t have the time (that’s freelance for you!) and b) my website wasn’t ready (and it still isn’t!) but to hell with it. I need to write this stuff down before I forget.

Firstly though, a caveat and then a bit of background. I’m not writing this blog post to ‘show off’ about anything I’ve ‘achieved’ over the last few years. I want to share as honestly as I can the journey I’ve been on (sorry! I know that sounds cringe!) in the hope that it might encourage other people who are thinking of making a change. #sorryifisoundlikeaknob!

My background is in project management and I was in my old job as a project planner for twenty five years (I KNOW! - a lifetime) before I made the break into freelance interior design. I did a Business apprenticeship, studying Business at college in the evenings, and bought my first house on my own at 22. I gutted it and did it up from top to bottom (with the help of my dad) and I worked (and socialised!) hard for ten years, paying all the bills and mortgage on my own. At this point I would love to post a picture of that house on this blog but I don’t have a single one! This was long before the days of camera phones!.

I sold that house when I met Rob and we bought the house that we still live in now. I then went part time for fifteen years whilst I had my three children and we’ve done the house up and extended it in that time.

Immy aged 2. Extension in progress, I was 9 months pregnant and the builders had just done a runner. True story.

During this time too I found that as long as I had a creative outlet I could cope with the rigours of being a working mum. As a lifelong interiors enthusiast (I constantly re- decorated and restyled my own bedroom as a child!) I studied Interior Decor in the evenings at City and Guilds level for two years. I then studied for an Art History degree with the OU (but never finished it, sadly).

As the children got older I began to have a little more time to explore my long suppressed creative side. One of the things I did was buy a vintage caravan and do it up inside and outside. Everyone thought I was mad, and they were right!

Alice the caravan. Hope Cove. Summer 2014.

I also launched an online shop called Huddle that sold new and vintage homeware that you could use both indoors and outdoors and I used the caravan as a pop up shop for it, popping up at street fairs and festivals.

It was the most fun ever but only lasted a couple of years because, firstly, I found that, once you’d paid your pitch fee, profit was minimal at organised outdoor events and, secondly, Rob absolutely hated that caravan with a passion!

Street Fair trading. That’s Flora from @violetnandpercy there but I didn’t even know her then - it’s a photobomb!

But my love of interiors and styling had been well and truly stoked and I realised anyway that I found styling the caravan at events much more enjoyable than actually selling things. It gave me the confidence to do more and more event styling and interior styling for friends (for free, at first) and to do more interiors projects at home.

My approach to interiors has always been the same - to buy the hero piece that you absolutely love - new or vintage - and decorate around it with new and vintage finds. Don’t copy anyone else’s style and don’t go out and buy a brand new room set. Upcycle, recycle and buy things that work hard for you and do more than one job. Work out what makes your heart sing and put your time and money into that. Do not let anything into your home that you’re ‘meh’ about and always, always scour eBay, your mum’s house, charity shops and skips before buying new.

At that same time, make the most of what your home is already offering you. Make the most of the light if you have big windows, strip the floors back if you have floorboards. Do not add anything until you understand the bones of the house, the scale and the light and how you will actually use the house as a family. Ignore trends, find your own style and create a home that you can truly be your authentic self in! (More about this in my next blog post).

Anyway, I began posting these opinions and pictures on Instagram almost exactly four years ago and for the first time ever found myself in a world where I was surrounded by other interiors enthusiasts. And they were so kind and supportive. I couldn’t believe that I could post a picture of an interior and get so much positive feedback on it. It was an absolute revelation and a game changer for me.

The first time a pic of mine went viral!

I met Lisa Dawson shortly after that at an interiors workshop. We’d previously bonded playing along with a hashtag called #mystylephotochallenge and quickly realised that we were at a similar life stage with growing children and that we were both interiors obsessed.

Lisa Dawson and I in Paris as part of a Nespresso campaign.

We decided to start our own interiors hashtag #myhomevibe and run weekly competitions to encourage people to use the hashtag. We’d seen our fellow U.S interiors enthusiasts run them and greatly admired them. We also saw from playing #mystylephotochallenge that hashtags created supportive communities and that the more inclusive the hashtag was, the more fun it was. I can honestly say that I’ve made many genuine friendships and business connections from engaging on interiors hashtags.

We also made friends with the owners of small creative businesses during our first few months of posting on Instagram and bought things from them. We found that when we posted pictures on Instagram containing the things that we’d bought, the small business then reported a big influx of orders. Not long afterwards Marks and Spencer’s offered to pay me ‘as an influencer’ to style some of their new season picnic ware. I didn’t even know what an influencer was at that point but I knew that I was loving these opportunities and that this could be the start of something amazing!

Nine months after first posting on Instagram I decided to take a years sabbatical from my job. I was very lucky that my employers offered this to anyone with long service and also very lucky that my husband was prepared for us to take the financial hit of me potentially not earning for a year. But I knew I HAD to take this opportunity to pursue a career in interiors now, while the opportunity was there, and at the end of November 2016 I left my job of twenty five years. I had the princely total of 16,000 Instagram followers, (I was SO naive!) and leapt into the unknown as a freelance interior stylist.

At this time too Lisa and I launched our own interiors workshops. Instagram and #myhomevibe had opened up a whole world to us we hadn’t known before - democratised interiors and people like us who loved interiors and wanted to embrace and celebrate that joy of knowing and owning their own interior style. I was totally up for this as I knew I could talk about and write about interiors FOREVER, however, I was absolutely terrified of public speaking and up until then had managed to avoid it all of my working life.

Luckily for me, Lisa loaned me her metaphorical ‘balls’ and we wrote ‘Styling your Home - No Rules Interior Cool’ and launched it in January 2017. The workshop was all about working out your own interior style - your ‘core’ style, how to implement it, where to source it, how to ‘shop your home’ and how to share it all on Instagram.

I was absolutely terrified about the whole thing. Putting myself ‘out there’ was very new to me and writing a course and selling tickets for it was such a massive step outside my comfort zone. What if no-one wanted to come and we made absolute fools of ourselves? I’d already left my job and the security that comes with that. I can’t even begin to describe to you the levels of anxiety I experienced at that time!

We ran our first workshop in January 2017 and, guess what, it sold out! I didn’t sleep a single wink the night before (no exaggeration!) but we did it and the feedback was great. I found that talking publicly was actually super easy if you’re talking about something that you absolutely love and believe in to a room full of likeminded people.

So here I am, three years later. I’ve never looked back and spent that first year working 24/7 and saying YES to absolutely every interiors related opportunity going. Some of the stuff I did in that first year was an absolute disaster and some of it was amazing but what I learnt was that every experience, good or bad, taught me so much and lead me to something else. I have three strands to my career now and it’s evolving all the time. 1) Designing interiors and sourcing furniture for homes and businesses. 2) Creating and writing styled and photographed interiors content for brands, large and small. 3) Doing talks and workshops about interiors and Instagram at all sorts of events.

I’ve managed to grow my own ‘balls’ now ( thanks for lending me yours when I needed them Lisa! ) and I’ve gradually learned to live the life of a freelancer - not at all easy when you’re pretty much institutionalised from working at the same place for 25 years. I’ve learnt so much about my strengths (I never knew I had some thimgs in me!) and about my limitations (man, I’m the worst procrastinator plus there really are some things you only need to try once!)

Mostly though I’ve learnt that working hard and taking risks is the only way to succeed and you can only claim any kind of success if you’re actually being your authentic self. If you’re not quite sure who you are or what your strengths are then just take the leap anyway as, in my experience, every step, good or bad, will get you there. There’s no such thing as failure, they are just learning opportunities. And what’s the worst that can happen? You mess it up and get egg all over your face? So what? It’s painful but it’s actually one of the best ever lessons in life!

Who knows what 2020 will bring? Instagram is not so much the community focussed place it once was (it’s too big - it’s gone from 400 million to over 1 billion users since I started on there) and things are evolving and changing so quickly. For the moment though it’s still the best place to meet, engage, collaborate, inspire and celebrate with other creatives and I know that I will continue to immerse myself in its world of interiors, connect and share for as long as it feels right.