Hiring for Culture, Leading with Values: Building a Team with Diverse Backgrounds with Trish Lynn

Season 9 of The Interior Collective Podcast is brought to you by Materio.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Interior Collective. I'm your host, Anastasia Casey, and today I'm sitting down with Trish Lynn, founder and principal designer of Colette Interiors, a full-service residential studio based in Chatham, New Jersey.

I want to ask you something before we get into this episode. When you picture your next hire, what do you picture? Someone fresh out of a design program? Someone who's already worked at another firm? Someone whose portfolio you can scroll through?

What if the best person for the job has never held a design title in their life?

Trish Lynn has built a six-person studio in one of the most competitive residential markets in the country — and she did it by hiring people with backgrounds in editorial, teaching, nursing, and finance alongside her design team. Before she launched Colette Interiors, she spent years in the corporate world, which meant she came to team-building with something most designers have to figure out entirely on their own: a real framework for what makes a person the right fit, and the confidence to look for it outside the obvious places.

In this episode, we're unpacking all of it. What those non-traditional backgrounds actually contribute to a design studio. How Trish hires for the qualities that don't show up in a portfolio. How she onboards someone into a creative process when they're coming from a completely different industry. And how she leads in a way that makes strong people want to stay.

If you've ever felt like you're hiring from a very small pool — or like every hire you've made has been a version of yourself — this conversation is going to open something up for you.