From Workroom to Luxury Consultant, A 35-Year Evolution

TRANSCRIPT

William Hanke (00:01)
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Panes the podcast where we talk with real window treatment and awning professionals about what’s working in marketing, what’s changing in the industry, and how to grow smarter. Today’s guest is someone who has just seen about every version of this industry over the past 35 years. Karen Lander started as a one-person workroom, built a team,

Opened a showroom and eventually walked away from it all to build a completely different kind of business, one focused on consulting and project management for high-end designers and architects. Today she works on full home projects worth six figures, collaborates with top-tier designers across the country.

And has carved out a niche that most dealers don’t even realize exists. Now she’s entering a new chapter, packaging everything she’s learned into systems and training to help the next generation shortcut the learning curve. This episode is all about evolution, choosing the right business model for your stage, and how to break into the high-end market without chasing volume. Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen Lander (01:12)
⁓ thank you. I’m so glad to be here.

William Hanke (01:15)
I appreciate your time. so you mentioned that your business has gone through five different versions now. So let’s go back to the beginning. What first got you into window treatments and did you expect it to turn into a thirty-five year career?

Karen Lander (01:21)
Yeah.

I did not expect it to turn into a 35 career, 35-year career. I had gone to college, I was a textile design major and a business major, and I wanted to get into textile design. I live in Philadelphia. I interviewed up in New York and I realized New York was not where this Philadelphia suburban girl wanted to live. ⁓

William Hanke (01:54)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (01:56)
So I went and worked in the management training program for a retail company. And I it was women’s clothing retail in malls. Malls were opening all over the country at this point. I was a store manager, a district manager, and then I became a training manager where I traveled all over the country to new mall openings and hired and trained management teams.

So I, you know, had a strong textile background. I’ve been a seamstress since age seven. My mom taught me how to sew. I won several awards for my clothing design when I was in high school. ⁓ and I really thought I was gonna go into fashion and clothing and but I had the big disruptor, which is starting to have a family.

William Hanke (02:30)
wow.

Karen Lander (02:49)
And I was doing my traveling job for about nine months after my first child was born. And I realized I was missing babyhood. ⁓ and so I decided to quit that job and open a business. And I knew I wanted to open a business. I had no idea what it was going to be. Both my parents had their own businesses.

So they were a role model for me. And also I had managed, you know, district managed ten retail stores. So I had that background. So I felt like I could pull everything together. And I decided to ⁓ figure out what my passion was, which was sewing and textiles. And I got into window treatments because I made my own and I knew of a person who

sewed window treatments for designers and I thought, well I can do that. and stay home with my children. And so it started. I’ll do it for a few years. When they’re in school I’ll go back to the corporate world and the rest is history.

William Hanke (03:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. So you started as a one person workroom basically. ⁓ what did those

Karen Lander (04:03)
I did in

my basement. Very low entry money needed if you are a seamstress and you have a sewing machine. my dad was a builder who had a lot of carpenters who built me tables, you know, a lot of the furniture that I needed. He got all that built for me, so it was

It just seemed like the thing for me to do at the time. And again, I thought it was temporary. I’ve never really been a long range plane planner. Everything has evolved

William Hanke (04:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So as you

Yeah. As you were building that kind of one person workroom, ⁓ at what point did you realize this could be more than just a small operation?

Karen Lander (04:52)
I think when I got to the point where I could not keep up myself sewing all the project demands that were landing on in my lap. so I hired some people to come to my house and work in my workroom. And we did that for a while and the

volume kept growing and actually as sales reps heard about me, I guess through designers that I was working for, I was also doing retail. I mean my first client was my the minister wife of my church who wanted to support me in this. ⁓ neighbors, friends, you know, so I was pretty much half

William Hanke (05:34)
Okay. Yeah.

Karen Lander (05:43)
doing it myself and half working for designers. And sales reps started showing up saying, you know, you should carry some lines of things. You’re selling retail, you’re sending everybody, you know, to some other store and then you’re just selling the stuff. But you can make yourself some more money if you can sell products, have some markup, and said okay.

So that’s you know, was another leap in my business in terms of income and vo sales volume. that’s that was the first step.

William Hanke (06:19)
Wow, that’s awesome. I love how you had kind of these people come along the way that help push you and prompt you into ⁓ scaling up. That that helps.

Karen Lander (06:26)
Yes. Yes. And I’ve

always helped others along the way. ⁓

William Hanke (06:32)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (06:33)
was involved in WCAA for many years. I was the local chapter president. I was on the board of directors as the treasurer.

I I did that probably I was really, really visible for about ten years. And I feel like the past ten years I’ve sort of disappeared because my

business has just exploded and I have no bandwidth for anything other than that. ⁓ so now I’m coming back. I’m gonna be more visible again.

William Hanke (06:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

That’s awesome. Well, I’m glad you’re on here today. We’ll we’ll help get the word out about you a little bit. so can you walk me through you went through a couple of them, but can you walk me through the different business models that you’ve had over the years?

Karen Lander (07:08)
Okay.

Yeah. so after I was, you know, I got to the point where I had several employees. I was strict workroom working in my basement. and there was a shop, a a home furnishing store in the town where I live.

That was a really interesting concept. The it was a two-story store. It had a restaurant. so it was kind of a place that people on the upstairs, so the people had to work walk through the downstairs retail area to get upstairs to the restaurant. And it was sort of like a community gathering kind of spot. And the owner had her shop, it was I for I don’t remember what the square footage was, but it was big.

William Hanke (07:59)
Okay.

Karen Lander (08:07)
department store size and she leased out like 10 by 10 square foot areas to other businesses that she would curate it to make sure it the look and the product fit in with her concept.

So I ⁓ rented one of these booths as they called it. Put up there was a wall, put up

Drapery, Roman shade, valance, all kinds of window treatments. Put my card out. There’s the store was staffed. I didn’t have to be there. Put my card out, put it made a bunch of pillows from leftover fabric for you know, some pickup s on-site sales. And that just gave me so much exposure. and you know, more and more designers and directors.

clients, would pick up my business card.

And I I can’t even remember when I started having a website. So I started my business in 1991. I mean it was pretty early on. But you know people would go to my website, see what I was all about, and word of mouth, I don’t know, I just kept getting

William Hanke (09:12)
Okay.

Karen Lander (09:27)
bigger and bigger to the point where I wanted my own store. Wanted my own showroom. And so the area I live in is this it’s a suburb of, you know, Philadelphia, a major city. And it’s a very wealthy area. And the rents are very high the commercial rents.

William Hanke (09:32)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (09:55)
Maybe it’s different now with the new the new economy, but

William Hanke (09:57)
Probably not. Probably not.

Karen Lander (10:01)
it was expensive. but I just felt like I was on fire. I had growth, I had, you know, clients, I had trained employees, I felt really

extremely ready for that situation. I had been a district manager. I had run retail stores. I knew how to do displays. I knew the psychology behind it all. so I went for it.

William Hanke (10:21)
Right.

Karen Lander (10:27)
Now I mean I did have to get a line of credit. I did have to borrow money. so it’s a very different animal than working out of your home, you know, staying lean, keeping your overhead low.

William Hanke (10:37)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (10:41)
⁓ but

loved it. I loved s setting it up. I loved doing the displays. I loved having my the clients that came in. It was, you know, I was really thinking this is it. This this is

William Hanke (10:56)
Okay.

Right.

Karen Lander (11:03)
what I’m gonna be doing for the next 20 years. and

Do you want me to go on the next part of the story?

William Hanke (11:11)
Yeah,

go for it. I I I’m interested in all the phases.

Karen Lander (11:15)
Yeah. So the next phase was I decided to close it. And after all this explanation of how much I loved it and how it was increasing my sales volume, why did I do that? Well, being busy does not mean being more profitable. So bottom line, I enjoyed it, but the fact that the overhead

William Hanke (11:24)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (11:40)
stole my profits. Now I had a staff to pay. I couldn’t pay myself until all the bills were paid and all the staff was paid. And my income dropped significantly. And I I really love y you should have somebody on who was successful at this.

William Hanke (11:55)
Interesting.

Ha ha ha.

Karen Lander (12:02)
And made money at it because that is a really hard transition. and I am not that much of a risk taker and never had been in debt before like that, you know, maybe a mortgage. that it just wasn’t my personality to keep pushing and keep pushing and seeing if if I could make this work.

William Hanke (12:08)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (12:29)
when I thought, hey, if it’s just me working out of my house, I’m gonna make the money. I’ll just take on the jobs that I wanna take on. and at this point, because I did scale and I did increase my volume up to a million dollar business, I couldn’t even keep

Up with the demand in my workroom. So I had reached out to other workrooms. So I had a lot of partner workrooms who I subcontracted particular projects to.

William Hanke (12:57)
Okay.

Karen Lander (13:00)
knew th how much bandwidth they do take for me personally. And so I thought, well, if I have a lot of couple good workroom partners, not just one, because the volume and you can, you know, you can have 70 windows in a house and you’ve got to get the window treatments done by a certain day.

You’ve got to spread that across different workrooms. so that became my new business model. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years. It’s been very, very successful. I really enjoy it. I really being enjoy being part of the designer teams. Some of my design clients are firms where they have five to ten designers working for them, some are individual designers.

William Hanke (13:36)
Okay.

Karen Lander (13:53)
working out their homes. but they are all designers, not really decorators, who are doing new builds or complete gut and remodels. So instead of needing a hundred jobs a year, I need maybe ten, a hundred thousand jobs a year to do a million dollars. and again, not that it’s

I’m not working. I’m I’m working a lot, but I’m doing different tasks. I’m not supervising the sewing, which took a lot when you have your own workroom. and I don’t it, you know, took 35 35 years and I figured it out. Making more money than I’ve ever made. And having more freedom, more free time than I ever had before. Yeah.

William Hanke (14:25)
Right.

Yeah.

That’s awesome. I love that you started

Right. Yeah. I love that you

started at home working for yourself, went the retail route, did all that, got a bunch of lessons from that, right? ⁓ and then longed for the old days of working at home, but now you had this huge asset, I guess is a good word, of all those connections, all the clients and all that stuff, and now you can become picky. So the the retail piece.

Karen Lander (14:54)
yeah.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

William Hanke (15:10)
Although it didn’t work out or you longed for something better, it still was a major piece of your overall scaling. ⁓

Karen Lander (15:16)
It

was because it gave me visibility. Yeah. And one of the problems with having that retail space is my designers that had I’d worked for before, they they stayed with me, but it was hard to attract new design clients because you had a retail store and they were afraid their clients would walk into your retail store.

William Hanke (15:19)
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s pretty awesome.

Karen Lander (15:42)
And buy directly from you. I mean, I had a strict policy of not letting that happen. If I don’t think it ever really did. Maybe once somebody asked me and I sent them right back to the designer. I said, you know, you work through her. it it it definitely was a fear though. designers, you know, they’re the front and center person to their clients.

William Hanke (15:53)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (16:06)
I have different relationships with different designers. Some of them, you know, give me a well thought out design that they just want me to implement. But a lot of them that I’ve worked with long term, you know, come to me first, say, Okay, what should I do with this situation? And I literally design it for them and they go and present it to their client. And some of them actually want me to come.

William Hanke (16:29)
That’s great.

Karen Lander (16:32)
You know, but most of them don’t. Most of them, you know, they’re the authority here in ⁓ client facings. So that’s what they want. And like I said, when I stepped back from the retail store, I was real plenty happy to be in the background. I didn’t I didn’t need to be front and center. I’m a I’m a real introvert.

William Hanke (16:37)
Right.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

⁓ okay.

I you’ve seen a lot of different versions of this business, but one of the biggest shifts was moving away from that kind of traditional growth plan. you mentioned you were making less money at that stage than before. What was what was happening behind the scenes that caused that?

Karen Lander (17:14)
well just the paying for all the overhead.

William Hanke (17:20)
Yeah, overhead was a big piece of that. That makes sense. ⁓ and the staff.

Karen Lander (17:22)
Yeah, so there was the

rent and there was the utilities. The showroom was split into three sections in the front were full window treatment samples. so that cost a lot, you know, to make all those samples. Then I had a whole wall of rod samples, so investing in

Physical samples clients could see of rods was a big investment. the middle of the store was a library. So all the sample books from vendors, most of them were free. I think I paid for some some lines. all the blind and shade samples.

You know, so all that sampling, which was constantly changing and the displays and the sampling, and then in the back I had my workroom. I moved it had moved it out of my basement into the back of the store. and had bought more bigger equipment, more professional equipment, you know, so it it took a lot to set it up.

William Hanke (18:33)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (18:36)
If I want to insert here some advice to people, is and my problem is I’ve always been wanting to be all things to all people and doing everything. And segmenting and niching and saying you are a workroom or you are a retailer or you service designers, like focusing on that is probably a better way to go.

William Hanke (18:46)
Right.

Yeah. Well they say there’s

in the nations, right?

Karen Lander (19:05)
You have to experiment

to find out, you know, where where you like, where you fall, ⁓ and in your market where you live, everybody lives in a different kind of area, what’s gonna work?

William Hanke (19:18)
Right. Yeah. Totally makes sense. ⁓ yeah, niching down obviously is is good ⁓ if you have that resource behind you of being able to do that, right? ⁓ I think that’s great. When you decided to close your your retail, what decisions went into that? Like what what made you think this is the right move at this point?

Karen Lander (19:30)
Yes. Yeah.

I think I got to the point where I just wanted to get out of there. number one because I was I wasn’t losing money, but I wasn’t making much money. excuse me?

William Hanke (19:57)
It became a job.

It became a job.

Karen Lander (20:02)
It became a job supervising employees.

William Hanke (20:03)
Mm-hmm.

Karen Lander (20:09)
I don’t wanna s I don’t know how to say this. ⁓ the employee mentality of I show up, I clock in, I get a paycheck. when I started instead of having my own workroom employees, instead in s when I started subcontract c subcontracting to other employees.

the attitude of this was their business. So they had a whole different mentality and I really liked having alliances with other business owners as opposed to having employees. I’ve had, you know, employees in all my different jobs my whole life and I kind of just wanted to be alone.

William Hanke (20:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Lander (20:57)
So that that was honestly what was going on in my head for you know.

William Hanke (21:04)
Yeah.

Yeah. How did your definition of success or scaling shift after that experience?

Karen Lander (21:12)
Well, instead of scaling, I remember for a long time before I hit a million dollars, I wanted to hit a million dollars. You know, maybe for probably ten years. And I thought scaling was like getting more and more and more volume. getting bigger and bigger. And I w I once I did that and I I hit those bigger and bigger goals, I hit that.

higher higher volume goals. but now I was like, but what happened to my profit margin? So to me, scaling is figuring out how to maintain the highest profit margin you can and making enough income to pay yourself what you think, you know, you need, you want at that particular time in your life.

William Hanke (21:42)
Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Lander (22:04)
So yeah,

I have a completely different thought about what scaling is. It ⁓ and more tied into profit margin than sales.

William Hanke (22:10)
Sure. Yeah.

Good point. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t you don’t want it to turn into a job, right? Then it becomes monotonous and it’s no longer fun. The fun that you thought it was gonna be when you got there, right?

Karen Lander (22:26)
Yeah, well I started

out a creative person sewing, which was my passion and my hobby for my whole life. And I literally gave all that up to manage people, to manage a a space that had to be maintained that the public could walk into. Yeah. But I mean it’s I loved it in some ways.

William Hanke (22:36)
Yeah.

Right.

Karen Lander (22:51)
And I didn’t and others.

William Hanke (22:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Well let’s shift gears a little bit. today you’re working mostly on full home projects and you mentioned some of those started coming in near the end of the retail piece of that. How did you really first break into that level of client?

Karen Lander (23:00)
Yes.

⁓ through designers that I had worked with for ten plus years, and they had clients that were gaining in their net worth and were starting to build bigger and bigger homes. And so we naturally evolved, and I’m gonna say it was three or four particular clients that I’ve had.

For 30 years and probably done five or six houses for each of them because they started, you know, in a four-bedroom colonial in a regular neighborhood. And they they kept scaling. they kept moving up to the next level, and they brought the designer who brought me with them, and that introduced me.

to the one bought a 40-acre property and built many buildings on that property and got one of the top architects in the country who happens to be based in the Philadelphia area. And then I start you know they started to get to know me because I would show up at some of the meetings. and

I would say at that level it is building relationships. And it’s slow. I think if you, you know, approach an architect and say, I do window treatments, will you hire me? If if you’re an expert in motorization, they might, because they need whole house integrators, and the architects and the builders might hire them directly, but they’re not going to hire a soft window treatment person. but they understand the need for it and they’re

they’re going to recommend you to designers who they work with. so it’s a it’s a very slow building thing. I would say the first thing that you need to do is understand the difference in the product you’re offering. Because there are different

William Hanke (25:01)
Okay.

Karen Lander (25:18)
construction techniques, there are different philosophies, there are different mindsets for the high-end client. I mean, these people they import stone from a cave in Italy to line their pool and, you know, crazy stuff. And the window treatments have to meet that level that’s throughout the entire home. So

William Hanke (25:45)
Right.

Karen Lander (25:46)
That’s what I had to learn that I learned through working with a lot of these high-end designers and through following a lot of the bespoke type designers in Europe. kind of the the the techniques originated there. I mean, they’ve been doing it for centuries, right? In the palaces and everything.

So I learned all that, how to apply it to the American market. And that was probably the first thing. to make sure, you know, I d I don’t think it’s something you can do right out of the gate and say you want to be work for these types of clients. You have to build your business. I don’t know if you have to wait build it for thirty five years the way I did, you know. but it’s

William Hanke (26:28)
Right.

Karen Lander (26:37)
It takes time. Mm-hmm.

William Hanke (26:38)
Yeah. Yeah. Well we’re going to talk about some shortcuts people can take ⁓ a little bit later. ⁓ what’s the biggest misconception that dealers have about attracting high end clients?

Karen Lander (26:43)
Yeah.

William Hanke (26:52)
All right, cool. all right, I’m gonna pitch the question again to you and then you can go into answering, okay? You doing okay? Okay, good. Yeah, great, awesome. all right, let’s go. So, Karen, before the break, we’re talking about high-end clients and how to attract them. ⁓ what’s one of the mega big let’s try that again. So, Karen, before the break, we were talking about attracting high-end clients.

Karen Lander (26:58)
Mm-hmm. yeah, fine. This is fun. ⁓

William Hanke (27:21)
What’s one of the biggest misconceptions that dealers have about attracting high-end work?

Karen Lander (27:31)
that you can’t really go to the clients directly. They you know, they are working through their architects, their builders, their designers. So it’s building relationships with those professionals in order to get into that market is

Probably

you know, probably if you’re trying to, you know, approach and get into that market and you’re just getting shot down, it’s not you. It’s that’s not their system. They they work on it’s all referral. They ask their fellow high end clients who might have built a house who they used. and they

William Hanke (28:03)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (28:18)
they just do referrals and I think that what they’re thinking is, well, if this person was happy with this window treatment person and their house is beautiful and I know their standard, I think that person would be good for me. So you you’re kind of in without having to go through any kind of interviewing or I mean those referrals are just golden. And that’s

William Hanke (28:42)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (28:44)
Pretty much how my name got passed around and even like a designer. So I ended up doing designers all over the country because they might have a client that has a house wherever they’re based, but also might be building something in the Philadelphia region. And so they come in.

And this is where the architect comes in and they say, okay, I’m the designer for this project. I’m out of town, but I’m gonna be working here. I I need workrooms, I need upholsterers, you know, like who can you refer me to? So because of the relationships that you build with the art architects, because they’re often on site when you’re on site, you get to know them, they’re like, yeah, you know, call drapery design.

She’s done a lot of art jobs. And then when I say to these new designers who don’t know me from Adam, you know, yeah, I’ve done four or five jobs for that architect, you know, in the past two years. And they’re like, Well, it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. I’ll hire you. So it really builds on itself. Probably the hardest part is getting that start, that first foot in the door. And for me it was

William Hanke (29:48)
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Karen Lander (30:03)
Growing with a designer who got her first foot in the door because her client evolved to that level.

William Hanke (30:10)
Love that. So for somebody that’s doing a lot of these mid-range jobs, your recommendation, your advice would probably be to start, you know, getting in with some of the designers and building those relationships. Would that be fair?

Karen Lander (30:22)
Absolutely. Yeah. Now, I could have some advice for how do you find those designers. ⁓ if you don’t really know, I mean, how do you know? You you Google designers, you get a lot of names, but how do you know who’s doing those types of jobs? so I would say number one, go to their website. Their website

William Hanke (30:23)
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome.

Yeah.

Right.

Karen Lander (30:48)
should where they have their portfolio should show you what kind of jobs they’re doing. and it’s also helpful to go to the architects’ websites because they will often, when they show their portfolio, they will often cite the designer on that particular project, the design firm, the builder, you know, they’ll give credit, the photographer,

They don’t usually tell you who the window treatment people are. But ⁓ that’ll give you some leads of some designers to approach. And at that level, even if designers have a workroom, they need more than one workroom, you know. If if like I said, if they need 70 window treatments delivered on one particular date, they’re gonna need they’re gonna need to break that up somehow.

And I did first start with a lot of these big firms as one of their workrooms. and eventually they use me a lot because, you know, we can get into the whole what kind of service you have to give them and how it’s different working in these types of projects.

William Hanke (32:01)
I love that you’re building those relationships. ⁓ Karen, what is it like working with those types of designers?

Karen Lander (32:09)
⁓ it is different. So I kind of break the window coverings industry into three segments of clients.

There’s your entry-level clients, they want affordability, they want speed, you know, they might have purchased

mass market online, you know, curtains that might be hemmed to their length or something bit which I call semi-custom, but entry level real custom products, they still expect that speed and simplicity, and affordability. And that’s, you know, newer homeowners, people

in their thirties, their forties, maybe just, you know, setting up their homes for the first time. and realizing, you know, their pottery barn draperies they had in their apartment are not gonna work in their new home. then I would say they move into more of the premium client level where they want

They’re they’re recognizing expertise, so they want somebody who has some expertise. They want personalization, they want some more bells and whistles, they want elevated service, but they don’t want three hundred dollar a yard fabrics. They don’t want linings, inner linings, micro L like all the couture little detailing.

⁓ that you can put on a drapery. And then I would say you get into what I call the bespoke level, where you have you know dressmaker couture kind of detailing the construction techniques get very much more hand sewing. You’re never going to want

⁓ blind machine blind stitch hems showing so you’re gonna hand stitch all your hems you’re going to always want to interline blackout becomes what’s called French blackout where you put a layer of black interlining in it a sateen so you don’t have the pinhole problem you don’t have

the stiffness and the lack of pliability the blackout lining has. So we definitely do a lot of French blackout as opposed to blackout, three pass type blackout. and like I said before, the bespoke clients have very high standards for everything in their home.

William Hanke (34:52)
huh.

Karen Lander (35:01)
And they might not know what those standards are for window treatments, but they know the difference when they see see it. They don’t know how you did it, but they know how you know they know it when they see it. And so they have those expectations. so and they also they’re very demanding. They expect, you know, the the day that

All the furniture comes in, the rugs come in, the window treatments come in. It I it’s not really just a day, it takes a week to two weeks in these big homes. they don’t want problems, they don’t want to hear. we don’t have enough drapery rings, you know. So you’re a problem solver before a problem even occurs. You know, you are

Opening every box, you are inspecting everything. the process, even way, way before that, you think through every decision, you weigh any possibilities of what could go sideways here. ⁓ you spend a lot of time on the proposal process. visuals and renderings are done for every single job.

I’m now learning how to use AI to do that because that is becoming the new standard to have realistic renderings. you’re a project manager, you’re keeping track of all the rooms, the fabric, and the design selections. you’re a liaison between the designer, the architect, the builder.

The GC on the job. And for me, the liaison between the whole house integrators, the motorization people, I personally don’t want to sell motorized products. So I But if they need motorized drapery or motorized fabric Roman shades,

William Hanke (36:44)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (37:04)
I have to work very, very closely with the integrator on the job because they are programming everything to a central system. And even if I wanted to, I can’t put a brand in that’s not in alliance with the brand that they’re using throughout the house. And so they they don’t really know much about soft window treatments.

So I have to we have to measure together, we have to discuss mounting together. what I do is I have I I I give them all the specs, I tell them what motors I want, I tell them what size rods I want, and they purchase them, they give me the motors, they install the rods, and then we build our Roman shades.

using the motors they gave us and then we need to be with them on site at the installation to get everything programmed and hooked up and working properly. So a lot of coordination happens there. you at installations you bring a big team. I mean one installer be there for a week or two weeks sometimes. So I bring

William Hanke (38:14)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (38:16)
teams of installers. Each installer has a steaming person, a seamstress who can fix on the fly anything that might need to be fixed. But for the workroom we do hang everything and steam it before we even take it to the job because anybody in this business knows that when you steam a drapery, no matter how many times you measured it and made it perfect, it oftentimes gets longer.

And so we, you know, steam it. If it gets longer, we’ll re-hem it, or adjust the top, like not quite totally finish off the top, so we can go back and adjust it if we need to shorten it a little. So that when we do that final steam, we know all that fiber and twist in the yarns that needs to relax has already relaxed. and

William Hanke (39:10)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (39:13)
Like I said, we’re we’re just

trying to prevent anything from going sideways. ⁓ so it’s a very different thing than managing a workroom or ⁓ managing in a retail store and selling to retail clients all day where you just go on site probably just to get measure.

William Hanke (39:19)
Yeah. And I love

Right. Yeah. I love that you said you’re a problem solver before the problems even happen, you know, and part of that is experience, but I think the other part of that is you relying heavily on systems, right? And the project management piece of that. so how does that play into your typical day-to-day?

Karen Lander (39:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

So systems mean organization. and doing each thing one this the same way each time, doing it one time. Before I had systems in place, one of my biggest bottlenecks was doing quotes. I would do a quote.

half in my head, half scribbling the calculations on a piece of paper. And then I would put that final number into my quote. And I had no record of how I got that number. I probably did that for ten, fifteen years. Until I thought, I have to start writing this down. So then I started writing it down and then I could never understand my handwriting or understand what I did. So I started building spreadsheets to do all this to calculate.

William Hanke (40:32)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (40:46)
For me. And that led to more and more sophisticated spreadsheets. And now I do a quote in my system that I built, which is basically spreadsheet-based. And if I need to go back and see why did I make that the finished length, I have got all my calculations that I just have to type.

In to my formulas and they automatically, you know, me giving it information, which is going to be different each time you do a calculation, but it has all the formulas in there that it automatically gives me the price, it gives me the yardage. and I can always go back if I need to, where that information is. So systems meant saving a tremendous out of amount of time.

William Hanke (41:29)
Love that.

Karen Lander (41:35)
in that particular process and not having to redo it over and over again. It also captures all the details in one place. So a a project management system is going to take you through all the different stages from proposals to presentation to getting the order to doing your purchase orders.

William Hanke (41:41)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (42:00)
And again, it’s all in one place. You see where you’re at. and it just saves so much time from you know, what do I need to order? You know, what have I ordered or how you know, you rarely can you sit down and you get a job and do all the purchase orders for every single product and component that you need for the workroom.

you know, for the rod hardware, for the blinds and shades, you know y usually you’re distracted. You’re doing other things. So when you go back to it, you have a system and you know exactly where you left off and where you need to continue.

William Hanke (42:36)
Yeah.

Love that. I’m a huge fan of systems too. That’s I’ve built my business highly on that. ⁓ for for creative business owners with that type of personality, maybe they hate systems. ⁓ how do you help them understand the value of a system?

Karen Lander (42:43)
Yeah.

Right.

Well, beautiful design might attract clients. A beautiful website attracts the clients, but the systems ensure that those designs are delivered accurately and profitably. I think that’s the bottom line. and you can go into a lot of different scenarios of where it helps in different things, but that’s kind of the bottom line.

William Hanke (43:20)
That’s a great way to say it. I love that. if if somebody listening ⁓ improved maybe just one operational area in their business, what would you suggest they start with?

Karen Lander (43:31)
I think number one is a project management system to get you organized and to have a place to keep everything. I know for a lot of time a lot of people I went paperless probably 20 years ago. And I know when I did it, was active my WCCA group at that time and people are like, no, no, no. I need my files. I need

William Hanke (43:47)
Okay.

Karen Lander (43:57)
my papers and my files. and that’s fine, but you also need a good computer online on your computer project management system that helps you get organized and stay organized.

William Hanke (44:17)
Yeah. Is there any particular project management system that you like?

Karen Lander (44:22)
I have played around with different ones. now when I started them, the first one I used was called Monday.com. And when I started it and I bought the system, I’m like, this is Greek to me. And I do not have time to set this up. So I

I hired a Monday.com expert, you know, who had a business, a consulting business to help other businesses set up that system. So that’s what I did. I think we worked with her for about six months, once a week meeting and you know, going through how to set it up. She didn’t just do it for me, she also taught me how to do it.

⁓ so that was really the way to onboard myself into the to that. I worked with that for a few years and then I felt like I hit some limits with that system. So I learned about one called Notion.com and I

Got another consultant and I set up another system with Notion. Notion goes into more levels. It’s actually a lot more complex and harder to learn than Monday.com. I know there’s Asana. I mean there’s I think what’s it called? There’s one that’s pretty simple and it’s a good place to start.

William Hanke (45:48)
Okay.

Karen Lander (46:02)
I’m sorry. It’s blanking on the name of it. ⁓

William Hanke (46:02)
Yeah, there’s there’s there’s teamwork,

there’s ⁓ we use clickup in our in our world. ⁓ there’s a

Karen Lander (46:10)
Yeah, there are so

many of them now. But they are s vital, I think, to a business. Even if you’re a sole proprietor working all by yourself, I think you need a system. You need a a project management system. if you’re a workroom, you need it. If you’re retail, you need it. So that’s absolutely the first thing.

William Hanke (46:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that’s great advice to find somebody. When I first got into starting to systemize everything, and I signed up for I don’t remember teamwork or one of them, ⁓ my gosh, it I I didn’t understand it. I I knew what they what the outcome would be, like at the output would be me able to be able to check boxes and do things. But putting all that together, my gosh. So the advice you said about hiring somebody that’s an expert to come in and start quizzing you and building out a structure.

Karen Lander (46:43)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

William Hanke (47:03)
That’s priceless. It it was I didn’t I don’t care what it costs at this point. Let’s get it done, right?

Karen Lander (47:04)
It is. It’s money well spent.

Yeah, yeah. You’ve got bigger fish, you know, to fry, so to speak.

William Hanke (47:13)
Yeah. And if you want the output to always be the same, you know, if you talk about the E-Myth and McDonald’s, every hamburger is always the same, right? If every drapery or Roman shade is always the same and to that same quality, you have to have those things in place.

Karen Lander (47:30)
Yes, absolutely.

William Hanke (47:32)
Love that. So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re up to now. ⁓ you’re kind of entering a new phase, turning a lot of this experience that you’ve done into courses and tools. What sparked that decision?

Karen Lander (47:37)
Okay.

I am

probably my age might stay I’m a lot older than I look. And I have I’m a grandmom now. I have grandchildren and I used to work a lot on weekends and now I spend my weekends with grandchildren. And I I’ve always wanted

William Hanke (47:52)
Okay.

Okay.

Love that.

Karen Lander (48:14)
to write a book, do something, and as technology has evolved, it has turned into course courses and templates and online digital products, which I didn’t even dream was a possibility probably even fifteen years ago. and I’m I’m techie and I love all that stuff. So

⁓ you know, I’m trying to channel everything I know into that these products. over the years I have a lot of people have helped me. I have helped people launch their own business. and they’ve always appreciated my help and my support. And some of them still come to me with questions and I’m building a community.

You know, we’re all be and I can answer questions for people who want to join the community. And I don’t wanna just retire and go have lunch with all my lady friends who were retired. I still wanna do something productive and but I want, you know, a little more freedom.

William Hanke (49:14)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Karen Lander (49:24)
You know, I just think it’s time for my next era.

William Hanke (49:26)
Yeah.

I love that you’re paying it forward. I think that’s great. who are these resources that you’re putting together? Who are they really for? Beginners, experienced pros, or maybe both?

Karen Lander (49:37)
They are for both, but every product is not for both. So there are a couple products up on my website now. And one of them is pricing for pricing guidelines for workrooms only. This wouldn’t really work for retailers or for designers.

William Hanke (49:40)
Okay.

Sure.

Karen Lander (50:01)
⁓ so it specifically explains that it’s for a workroom. but there are everything I’m starting, so I’m just you know, starting to roll these things out, and I assume I’ll be doing this for about five years, building all this stuff. so I’m starting w appealing to beginners, but the pricing thing actually the way I build it.

could be to anybody, any level. and some products are towards strictly for window treatment specialists. Others are for interior designers. Having worked with so many interi interior designers and different types of interior designers, I know where the holes are in their knowledge. So I’ll be building products specifically for them.

William Hanke (50:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Karen Lander (50:58)
and it’s again an evolution, you know. I have an outline, I have a long list of course titles and template titles. But when I actually go in and start building these things, even if it’s something I built for myself 20 years ago and I’ve been using it for myself, I’m thinking, okay, I’m thinking I’m a brand new person, you know.

William Hanke (51:03)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (51:24)
what works here for me and what doesn’t work for me. Can I use this product for both markets or do I have to have one for designers and one for workrooms? ⁓ so again, I’m kind of doing what I learned to do and find any problems before they occur.

William Hanke (51:43)
That’s awesome. you’re also basically shortening the learning curve for newer people that are coming along or people that are maybe struggling, been in the business for 10, 15, 20 years, but are struggling, maybe like the pricing for workrooms, maybe that’ll help them, you know, change.

Karen Lander (51:55)
Yes. Yes. I am trying

to shorten the learning curve and I’m trying to simplify it. this is a very complicated business, which all the people who helped me set up my project management systems were like one of them literally was like, Whoa, this is the most complicated business I ever set up and she’s done all kinds of things. I’m like, Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here. ⁓

William Hanke (52:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Karen Lander (52:24)
So it speeds up the learning curve. I know when I came into the business in 1991, there wasn’t really anything. It was three or four years later a woman named Cheryl Strickland started ⁓ putting together a so what newsletter and she started traveling the country with seminars. And I remember I was five years in and I went to her

first seminar and she came to the Philadelphia area and I was just like, my God, this is so fabulous. ⁓ ’cause I it was like book learning before that. Literally you went to somewhere and bought a book. And I like I said, I bought a lot of books written in Europe. you know, where this skill developed and then was brought over to this country.

William Hanke (52:56)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (53:16)
Only two hundred years ago, but it’s been happening over there for thousands of years.

William Hanke (53:20)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

So Karen, what’s what are you most excited about in this new chapter or new phase of what you’re doing?

Karen Lander (53:29)
⁓ I’m excited to get back into having a lot more interaction with my fellow window treatment people through my community and through the courses. Each each course and each template actually has its own community. so people can ask questions, I can be in there and people can help each other and give each other ideas of how they’re using the product, and so I can get feedback.

⁓ to you know do any tweaks that I need to do for the products. so I’m really looking forward to that interaction but also looking forward just to seeing the results to seeing how people can grow more quickly than I did over the years and having a lot of tools at their fingertips. Also trying

to at first I was like you build one big course all about you know take you from soup to nuts of how to do windy treatments and then I was like this is overwhelming this this is this course would take you a year like college to get through so I’m segmenting it down so it’s more a la carte people can buy what they need so if you’re brand new there’ll you know be a package for brand new people.

William Hanke (54:33)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (54:48)
If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you know, then you can say, ⁓ I need help with my product knowledge. I need help with, you know, my systems. I’m trying not to duplicate things that are already out there. There are fabulous, fabulous people out there teaching how to sew and how to make these things. And I’m

I have all that knowledge, but I don’t feel like I need to duplicate any of that. so but there’s not much out like what I learned in college as a textile major. there’s not a whole lot out there about that. And also for designers and how to specifically specify and design window treatments beyond the pretty.

William Hanke (55:19)
Right.

Karen Lander (55:42)
I think that’s a niche that I’m a really good at and that I can contribute some things that aren’t out there. sales and marketing I think is covered again by a lot of people. I’m not going to really focus on that much. but I will say that I think your website is one of your most important marketing tools.

And that your website reflects exactly who you want to attract as your client. yeah.

William Hanke (56:16)
I would agree with that. you mentioned very early on about ⁓ high-end clients, right? They’re not going to Google and looking for designer. They’re getting those referrals from friends, family, neighbors, that side of stuff. But once they get that referral, they’re definitely going to go online and start investigating, right? ⁓ yeah, yeah. So that’s where the website piece comes in and making sure that you look high-end. and ⁓ and

Karen Lander (56:29)
Right.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yes.

William Hanke (56:43)
you know, filter out the the Craigslist shoppers and the tire kickers and that kind of stuff. So fantastic advice. ⁓ couple rapid fire questions for you. ⁓ what’s one business model in this industry that you would never go back to?

Karen Lander (56:53)
Okay.

⁓ I think what I said before, trying to be all things to all people and serving many markets at once. ⁓ you know, ⁓ th that’s confusing, that’s time sucking, it’s costly, you know, to have samples, just for instance, blind and shade samples, you know. Have your high-end samples, have your budget samples.

William Hanke (57:07)
Yeah.

Right.

Karen Lander (57:25)
It costs a lot of money. and your brand positioning can be confusing to a client. yeah, when your ideal client goes to your website, they need to understand who you are and who you serve. And if they feel like you don’t serve them, they’ll leave and that’s actually what you want.

William Hanke (57:31)
Great point.

Karen Lander (57:48)
If it looks like you might serve them and they call you and you spend time with them and then you really don’t, you’ve wasted that time when you could have been serving the clients that do want you.

William Hanke (57:58)
Right.

Yeah, great point. what’s something about high end clients that would surprise most people?

Karen Lander (58:11)
my gosh, they’ll spend like ten thousand dollars for a window treatment and they won’t buy a custom pillow because they think you’re overpricing it. they have no limits financially, but they have mental limits of where they feel like they’re being taken advantage of and overcharged.

William Hanke (58:35)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (58:35)
So

it’s kind of a fine line. They know when you’re just jacking up everything. And it’s a fine line between making sure you’re well covered and well compensated for what you’re doing and not appearing that you’re really overcharging.

William Hanke (58:53)
Yeah, that’s great. and I’ve experienced that for sure. ⁓ what keeps you excited about the industry after thirty-five years?

Karen Lander (58:56)
Yeah.

Well, I love that we’re creating one of a kind items that don’t exist anywhere else. So really I say everything is a prototype, you know? you’ve never used you might have made a million Roman shades, but you’ve never used that particular fabric and that particular style and size of shade. and it takes your knowledge and your artistry.

to make it work. But as old school and artistic and creative as it is, it also embraces technology. So it’s rooted in the past, but you’re also moving into the future with it. So the the that whole combination of function, craftsmanship, technology and

Beauty, gorgeous. my gosh, look what we created. Things I love about this industry. I had a sister-in-law once who was ⁓ you know, worked in an office with you know, not not physical products, and she came over to my basement and saw all my stuff. I was like, my god, you need so much stuff to do your job.

William Hanke (1:00:23)
Ha ha

Karen Lander (1:00:23)
And it’s like, yeah, I like all my stuff. So yeah, I’m still excited. and still contributing after all these years.

William Hanke (1:00:26)
Yeah. That’s great.

That’s fantastic. if someone’s feeling stuck in their current business model, what would you tell them to consider first?

Karen Lander (1:00:41)
Okay, the one thing that I had trouble with, I’ve you know, alluded to this a little bit, and I would say is number one, define what your perfect business would look like. So I kind of knew what it what it would look like 20 years ago, but I was afraid that if I moved into the high end.

I had a lot of, you know, mid-level clients that I would lose them and I would stop making money altogether. so if I were to go back and if I were to give someone who’s stuck and feeling like they’re not moving forward, I would say to take a really big personal inventory and just don’t hold back.

Don’t give yourself a reality check in your brainstorming process. just dream about what really where would you like to go? What would your perfect business look like? Who is your client? What products and services do you sell? and then I would say tweak your website, build your website to start moving towards that. post on social media.

you know, trying to speak to that particular client. and you know, do all your marketing and your image building and you know, unless you can shut down revamp and then reopen, I just think it has to be a gradual thing so you don’t alienate your current clients.

William Hanke (1:02:24)
Yeah.

Karen Lander (1:02:24)
⁓

and but you attract your new client that you want. And just really defining I think a a lot of people like me, I kind of well, drifted and what comes next. And once I finally closed the showroom and I said, you know what I really want to do is work with work in these giant homes that I see being built around here. once I really defined that and really

Focus solely on that. That’s when th and it’s funny because that’s when things really take off. ⁓ but there’s a definite fear in letting go of what you’ve had.

William Hanke (1:02:54)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah. I love that. I think that’s pretty smart to to ⁓ start to define what’s going on. Let’s see, we got somebody else talking here.

Karen Lander (1:03:14)
Not here.

William Hanke (1:03:16)
Maybe it was Liz. All right. All right. We’re about done here. let me see where I’m at. okay.

Karen Lander (1:03:21)
One piece

of advice.

William Hanke (1:03:23)
Yeah. Karen, what’s one piece of advice you would give to somebody who’s trying to grow but without burn without burning out?

Karen Lander (1:03:33)
I think keep your business as simple and as lean as you can. Really take a look at everything you’re doing and say, okay, if I stop doing this, would my business suffer? and I think everybody will find things, the busy work they’re giving themselves without even realizing it, that’s really not necessary.

and just getting getting rid of the clutter. ⁓ ’cause that’s what keeps you burning out and that’s what makes you go in circles.

William Hanke (1:04:09)
Yeah, it’s good for your mind too to get rid of some of that clutter, right? Just ⁓ definitely. ⁓ well Karen, thank you so much for being on today. ⁓ you’ve you’ve given us some awesome advice. I’m sure it’s gonna resonate with the with the listeners. if somebody wants to learn more about you and especially the courses and things you’re up to now, where’s the best place for them to go?

Karen Lander (1:04:13)
Absolutely.

⁓ the best place is really to go to my website, which is drapery-design.com And I like I said, I have my community is up there. You can join my community. You get two weeks free to see if you want to do it. And then it’s just forty-eight dollars a year, so it’s low, low entry point. and there’s two

William Hanke (1:04:48)
Okay. Yeah.

Karen Lander (1:04:59)
template systems up there. One’s about pricing and how to build your pricing structure and how to present it to your client. And the other one is about I call it a welcome guide, a guide that you build to give your client, which again is a qualifier for your client, to make sure they really want to work with you and they understand how you work and all that.

William Hanke (1:05:21)
Okay. Yeah.

Karen Lander (1:05:22)
⁓ everything

that I do is customizable. You can brand it yourself, you can put you know your own text in, although I do pre-populate it with text. I even pre-populate my pricing system with my pricing system. So you it you gives you, if you are brand new, it gives you a springboard and a starting point. so anyway, you can go to my website and see those, and also sign up for my email.

email list because I will be really communicating with my email list and you know rolling out new products but also giving advice and teaching through the emails which is also tied in with my blog and I’m pretty bad about posting on social media but I’m gonna try to get better at that.

William Hanke (1:06:09)
That’s okay.

Yeah. I’ve joined a lot of coaching programs, courses, things like that. And for forty-eight dollars a year, ⁓ one small tweak to your business, you should be able to make that money back pretty quickly. So that’s fantastic. And I love that you’ve got plans to roll out a whole bunch more stuff, which at some price, so at some point your price will probably go up. So ⁓ great time for them to jump in now. ⁓ I really do appreciate you being on today.

Karen Lander (1:06:31)
Mm-hmm.

William Hanke (1:06:37)
thank you so much for sharing all this information. ⁓ we’ll make sure to to link to your website in our show notes along with some of the other things we talked about today.

Karen Lander (1:06:46)
thank you Will. It was really fun. I was glad glad to be here and hopefully somebody got some sparked some ideas in some people.

William Hanke (1:06:57)
Yeah,

yeah, thanks so much.

Well, wow, what a conversation. Karen just walked us through something we don’t talk about enough. That’s there’s no single right way to grow a window treatment business. It really comes down to what kind of life and business you want to build from evolving through five different business models to building a high-end consulting niche. There’s a lot to take away here, especially if you’re thinking about moving up market.

or simplifying your operation. If you got one useful idea out of today’s episode, share it with someone else in the industry who you think could benefit from it. And as always, make sure to follow marketing Panes for real conversations with people who are actually in the trenches doing it. We’ll see you in the next episode.