The Home Staging Association UK & Ireland has been lucky enough to be able to attract the brightest minds of the home staging business.

Each and every one of our members adds something remarkable, special and innovative, allowing us to grow as an association and keep strengthening our ties within the industry.

We have always said that the goal of our association was to build a community for professionals and made by professionals.

Making the Home Staging Association UK & Ireland the go-to place when it comes to innovation, education and connection within the industry has been a rollercoaster ride, filled with memorable moments and great networking opportunities for all of us to learn from each other and with each other.

Home Staging is a highly collaborative line of work that thrives by making long lasting relationship within different branches of the same sector, so that this collaboration is always expanding and bringing together the best of the industry.

For this reason we got in touch with our lovely member Natasha from Dressing Rooms Home Staging and she was kind enough to answer some questions about her business, trajectory and goals.

Here’s what we gathered from our inspiring conversation with her:

Q: Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background and your business
A: “I’m Natasha and I own Dressing Rooms Home Staging. I’m a huge fan of traveling and one of my goals is to travel around Australia and Asia with my partner. I love animals, especially horses and anything that lives in the sea so in the future I’d love to do more volunteer programs to help with coral conservation and endangered species. I once spent a month in the Maldives on a whale shark research program and it was one of the best experiences ever! 

My business, Dressing Rooms, was set up after I left Uni and I decided I wanted to fill a gap in the market. We are based in West Yorkshire and offer a range of services – physical staging for sale, virtual staging and HMO furnishing and dressing. We started out just staging vacant properties for sale but during lockdown we launched virtual staging, helping landlords attract better tenants, secure more investment and get quicker sales. It has completely taken off and we’ve had such a great response from it. 

I also invest in property (mainly BTLs and flips) so have a very good insight into what investors need and want out of staging, it’s helped enormously and clients seem to really appreciate my first-hand experience too.”

Q: How did you start your Staging business?
A: “I started Dressing Rooms Home Staging after seeing a huge gap in the market. Staging was growing in popularity and more and more people wanted to stage their properties for sale but there were not enough companies to meet those demands. I took a few different courses with some great women and launched Dressing Rooms in late 2018. At first we solely offered physical staging for sale services but now we have expanded to offer virtual staging and HMO dressing too.”

Q: What advice would you give to your younger self and people starting out a Staging business on their own?
A: “I would say to define what you really want out of the business. When I started I don’t think I had a clear enough vision of what I wanted the business to become which meant I wasn’t following any kind of plan to reach my goals – I didn’t even now definitively what my business’ goals were! You need to have a plan and an end goal so you can take steps to get there.”

Q: What would you say is the hardest part of setting up a business?
A: “Business is hard and nobody really talks about all the different skills you need – marketing, accounts, networking, strategy, management, (the list goes on!), you’re great at interiors and design but there’s a lot of different arms of the business which you need to work on. It can be pretty overwhelming at times and that can be tough to deal with. You need to try to understand what you can outsource and see how that could help you grow.”

Q: During your career we imagine you might have made some mistakes, as we all do when we are starting out. Can you share some of these mistakes and tell us what you learned from them?
A: “My biggest mistake in the past has been undercharging for work I’ve done. I’ve learnt to value myself a bit better now but it’s still something I struggle with. At the start you just want to get work in, so you price yourself low to  get more business. The issue is that you then end up with penny-pinching customers who are a pain to deal with and you do all this work to not make very much out of it. 

I also made the mistake of buying too many of the same bed. Having used them once, I thought they were great, easy to store and make up. Having now moved on to different beds, I can see what a pain they were and have no idea why I stuck with them, bought so many and didn’t even consider other options for so long!”

Q: What would your tips for staying focused and keep progressing be?
A: “Having your goals and steps to get to where you want to be. Planning out your days and weeks into blocks of time – it’s very easy to get distracted with calls and new emails but people don’t need a response in the first 2 minutes, ignore them and get back to them in your own time when it’s convenient.”

Q: What has been your biggest accomplishment so far?
A: “It’s a secret for now!! I’m working on something very exciting but can’t say anything at the moment.”

Q:  What are your favourite types of projects to work on?
A: “I love all the services we offer for different reasons but I think my favourite type is our OG service of physical staging for sale. A lot of planning (along with heart and soul) goes into those projects and it’s so rewarding to see it all come together on the day. Receiving the photos back from our photographer is one of my favourite things too as it is the culmination of all that hard work. Plus it’s great when you get a fab result for your client too! Best yet was 2 offers 10k over asking after being on the market for 4 days.”

Q: How would you describe a typical day at your company?
A: “There’s no such thing as a typical day really. It can be anything from fun things such as site visits, designing, sourcing accessories, virtual projects or client meetings to the slightly less exciting accounts and admin. Then you have my favourite days – installation days!”

Immensely proud of what Natasha has accomplished so far with Dressing Rooms Home Staging we can’t what to see what she has in store for the future.

We believe that some of the things she mentioned, especially regarding starting out and the biggest hardships and rewards of the job, are extremely valuable and would certainly inspire fellow home stagers and aspiring ones to keep following their intuition, ambition and learn to appreciate the lows because the best is, always, yet to come!