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Welcome to The Design Board, a podcast created by the team at UpSpring that focuses on design, development and everything in-between. We invite innovators in our industry and explore topics that support your growth in every way. The Design Board is a proud member of SURROUND, a podcast network from SANDOW Design Group, featuring the architecture and design industry's premier shows. Check it out at surroundpodcast.com.
Welcome everyone to The Design Board, a podcast by UpSpring that focuses on design, development and everything in between. We host innovators in our industry and explore topics that support your growth in every way. I'm your host, Tiffany Raffi, and today I'm joined by Stacy Garcia, CEO and Chief Inspiration Officer for Stacy Garcia Design Studio and Chairholder of the Color Marketing Group. Stacy has over 25 years of experience in licensing design, brand, product development, color forecasting, trend forecasting, textile sourcing and development, textile design and lifestyle design. Stacy's mission is to inspire and empower others through design, education and collaboration. She has partnered with some of the world's leading manufacturers to create products that reflect her signature style and vision for the commercial, hospitality and healthcare industries. Additionally, Stacy serves as a CEO and founder of woman-owned LebaTex, a commercial textile company specializing in high-performance fabrics.
All right. Well, Stacy, thank you so much for being here with me.
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks so much, Tiffany.
Of course. Well, before we delve into current trends, I want to say congratulations on the 25th anniversary of LebaTex. As a fellow-
Thank you.
... female entrepreneur, I'm eager to hear about how you've navigated the many, many, many, I'm sure challenges and I know demands of building your business from the ground up. Do you want to kick us off a bit?
Yeah. I mean, it's crazy when I put that post on LinkedIn and realized that we had hit the twenty-five-year milestone because it's literally feels like a lifetime. 25 years is an entire life. So it was just wild to process that that moment had come and that I'd really been at this chipping away at, like you said, running a business. But there is something different I think about being a female entrepreneur. And so many different expectations that we put on ourselves and that other people around us put on us as well in terms of juggling, especially when you have a family like you and I do, juggling the responsibilities of trying to grow your business and scale your business and keep your clients happy and keep your team members happy and also keep your children happy or keep your spouse happy.
So there's a lot of pressure that goes along with it, but I'm really proud of myself, which I don't say that out loud often, and I'm really proud of the team that has been along for the journey with me because I've had many of our team members who have been on board for over a decade with us and over the course of time really helping it grow. So it's been amazing and I can't believe we're here.
It is amazing. We're 16 years in, and I know how many changes and iterations we've seen our industry go through, and I can only imagine what you've seen in the 25 years. So I'm excited to dive in and learn more from your experience and have our listeners do the same.
So kicking right in, I mean, having successfully launched both LebaTex and Stacy Garcia's Studio, I'd love it if you'd share just some key advice to other women entrepreneurs who might be looking to embark or start off on a similar venture.
And it's survival, right? Yeah. When you're under a deadline that you didn't get to have any input around, right? How can you get the most efficiency into your workflow while still getting an excellent result? Well, sometimes it's easier to just run the same play over and over again.
Right. In your experience, what are some common challenges architects and designers face when sourcing products? I mean, I think we're talking about how does this impact their overall design concept?
Advice that I would give to other women who are looking to start out on their own venture is not to overthink things. I see so many people that I've worked with and mentored along the way who get stuck in decision paralysis, trying to protect every bit of risk that's out there and trying to be perfect, have this perfect plan, but there's inherent risk in just living. We could cross the street and there's risk in that. So my advice is to just start to action. Have a solid plan, be comfortable with your plan, but at some point, you have to actually go and take action and put yourself out there and be open to rejection because that's where you learn and that's where you refine your process. So a lot of it is really getting started.
The second piece of advice that I would give to people who are listening to this thinking about getting started, and this was given to me by my father when I was first launching the business, and he had said to me, you only need one client. So I know you have these big visions and you have all of this growth that you're hoping to achieve and all of these things that you want to conquer in your dreams, but you need one client who's willing to transact with you. Your first client puts you in business. And when you can convince somebody that you're going to bring them help and add them value and take away some pain points and make them money, whatever it is that you're offering up, you get that first client and you are now officially in business. And there's no turning back after that. It's only move ahead. And that was such great advice for me because I remember when I closed that first account, it was like, okay, here it is. This is real. I'm officially in business now. So it's one step at a time and you'll get there.
I love that so much. That first client is everything, and then, building off of the back of that, it builds momentum, it builds credibility, it gives you the confidence you need to move forward. So I am definitely in the camp of take action, and the only thing I'd layer onto that, Stacy, is commit. I mean, I think so many businesses fail in their first two years, but I think the reason they fail is that people just expect things to move faster than they otherwise would, and perhaps they're stopping before there's a level of maturity that can come just with time for a business. So no, that's really helpful.
Yeah, I love that. And you're right in that commitment that there's this concept of three feet from gold, you stopped digging, you've been digging, you give up your three feet from the gold. So that's always been a mantra also. And as a leader of two companies, I've led through some really challenging times, I mean, through the crash of 2008 and again through COVID, and you don't know where the bottom is going to be, and you're paying people and you're paying your rent and you're trying to keep things moving without the income that you're expecting to receive. And that can be really scary. Again, advice that I had gotten long time ago was just that as long as you're not willing to give up on the business, you'll always have a business. And so even if you have to go down to the bone on certain things, as long as you keep getting up and keep trying to service your clients, you'll still have a business when this is all said and done. And so I remember that wisdom as well, and that's taken me through some really hard times.
That makes complete sense. I always say, even to our staff, the bottom felt like it was about to fall out from under us maybe three times before it never felt that way again. And every time, we would question, are we doing the right thing? Should we double down here? And there's really just that commitment right over time that led to that success and that effectiveness. Also, our pride. We're pretty stubborn over here. So what are you going to do?
As a collaborator with many renowned brands in the design industry, how have you seen the industry evolve throughout your career? I know you just mentioned a few big moments that impacted the industry, but just overall the arc in that 25 years, what have you seen?
It's so true.
So how can architects and designers effectively sift through the noise to find the best products for their projects?
Oh, my gosh, there's been so much change. I mean, we're in different verticals also, so it's fun for me as not only a business owner and designer, but a trend forecaster to see where different things are happening and where tastes are and how the industry has evolved. In hospitality, when I was first starting, you couldn't sell a white bed to a hotel for any amount of... It could have been free. Here's free beautiful white sheets. Nobody was going to put that on their hotel even at the high end level until Sheridan came out with their Sweet Dreams program. At the time, it was like patterned printed quilts that were on every bed. I mean, we laugh now because I'll be watching any movie that you might see or mini series or whatever on Netflix if they're filming in a seedy hotel and it's like the grossest of the gross, you might see one of my patterns from 25 years ago on those bedspreads. So some of our product is famous still from showing up in these movies, but I've seen the sophistication of the industry in general.
So once those floodgates open, you couldn't turn it back. And then you layer on all the sites that consumers can do research on and really feel armed with good information, whether they're traveling or making a purchase for their home. They've gotten much more savvy, much more sophisticated, and the expectations have gotten so much higher with how people want to experience their space.
Absolutely. I always say, when we first started out, even the 15, 16 years ago, design was not a mainstream conversation. The number of reporters even who cover design were like six at the time in publications that our clients wanted to be in. And so it has been so incredible. I mean, my hope is that we've been part of the growth of that conversation, but it has been so fun to ride that wave as well and just see how relevant and how impactful the conversation surrounding just design and experience and mental health and sustainability. Gosh, it touches everything, right? Has evolved over time, and it has been a privilege to be part of that conversation, and from your perspective, Stacy, to design for it and to push it forward because it's really creators like you who are defining what the next level and the evolution of that conversation is. So that has been amazing to watch.
Despite significant economic and cultural changes, some design themes do persist though, right? So what do you believe accounts for this continuity?
Well, first and foremost, our role is to aid in the process, make it more efficient, make better decisions. Because at the end of the day, any building is only as good as the materials that are going into it. You could have a world winning Pritzker Prize design project, and if you specify the wrong materials within five years, you're going to see that and that building's going to start to crumble or fall apart. And so the materials are the Lego bits that come together to determine the overall quality of that design. And so that's just such an important part to what we offer the uses of our platform, is helping them to really make the best decisions possible, but then also do that in a really timely fashion.
Yeah. And I think we've all seen evidence of when products have been specced incorrectly. And it is kind of unbelievable that it still happens, but it does. BIMsmith seems to be a game changer for architects. How does it help architects discover and utilize products they might not have known about before?
Well, in the forecasting world, we would call that traditional design or traditional colors or classics might be an even better term probably than traditional because traditional might be more of a style. So I'm going to call it classic design or classic colors. There are things that live on and on. It's kind of almost like if you related it to fashion. You can always have a really great black blazer or a really classy black sheath dress that's never going out of style. You don't get rid of it. As long as it's in good quality and it's in good condition, that's going to live in your closet as a staple piece. And the same is true for the world of interior design, whether you're designing commercial or residential spaces, there are going to be elements that always have a reason for being and don't really ever go out of style.
I think in order to maintain relevancy, the key is how you mix and match those elements. So the same way that your blazer or your sheath dress that we were just talking about, you might update your accessories to make them look more today. You would do the same thing in the world of interior design. So you're using whatever that might be, a classic hand knotted rug with a traditional Persian motif. That is never going away. The good is good, but the furniture that you layer on top of it might evolve. And so perhaps you're going from something that looks more Regency style to something that looks a little bit more modern in shape, something like the curved shapes that we've been seeing, and really put a twist on that interior.
I think we can all buy into the classics. I mean, I myself am big on classics and timeless, but there is a ton of focus for many on trends and this focus of staying on trend. So why do you think there is such a focus or even obsession at times with staying on trend, and is it the key to success in the industry or can you be blind to the trend sometimes?
Well, I think a lot of designers that I speak to want to try to rise above the trends. They have planted their flag in this concept of like, "Well, we don't follow the trends. We're immune to the trends. We're not about the trends," but the reality is everybody is impacted by the trends because when you talk about trends, I think we have to first go into a definition of what does that even mean. What is a trend? How do we define that? And some of the confusion in the marketplace today is built off of social media and these really fast moving what social has dubbed a trend, like a TikTok trend, which I would argue all day long if it has TikTok in front of it and a hashtag, it's not a trend. Or if it's some kind of, again, these kind of fast moving things, we would define classically as a fad. So if it's fast moving, it's a fad and it's going to be moving out as fast as it came in.
The idea of a trend is that it happens over time, and so it's more likely to be more timeless if you're really following trends as we define them, not as TikTok defines them. The challenge is, I think because of that language and because of how quickly things are happening in the market, people have gotten confused about what it means. The reason that trends are important and the reason that I really believe people can't be immune from them is trends are really almost a reflection of the human psyche of what the culture of the people is interested in. And it's driven from different things. It's how we feel about the economy. It's how we feel about the environment. It's how we feel about the political landscape and then how we're expressing ourselves and how we're choosing to spend our dollars, whether that's on experience or a renovation in our home or new fashion items.
So trends definitely impact buying behavior, and what we want to surround ourselves with or what we choose to spend our money on is driven by the trends that are happening. So I believe that understanding the trends are really important to making sure that as you're guiding your clients, if you're an interior designer or your consumer who's making a purchase, understanding the trends gives you confidence to know that you're investing in something that's not going out of style fast, that you're not actually going to get caught in a fad, but that you're investing in something that will have longevity.
And I'll give you the example because as a forecaster, we're seeing the trends before they hit the market. I mean, we're working with our partners in manufacturing to create collections a year, sometimes 18 months in advance before any consumer sees them, before any wholesaler is even exposed to them at a trade show. And so we're really having to do research early on to get ahead of it.
And one of the things we saw, this is a great example, is in kitchen design. For so long in the United States, kitchens were leaning white. Everyone was doing these all-white kitchens, and if you weren't doing white, you were doing gray. So you had gray kitchens that were huge. If you invested in these, it's not a problem. These are pretty timeless colors. White and gray are not a flash in the pan, but things do start to look dated over time.
And so as we were consulting with people and they're doing, "Okay, I'm doing a new kitchen right now, I'm doing a new tile collection or whatever it is," we were really pushing people to say, if you're going to make an investment like this and the kitchen's not going to be done, it's like a once in a lifetime thing that you do in a house. Most people are not staying in the home long enough to do a second kitchen reno. So these are huge investments from a consumer perspective. We were approaching people like lean into the woods, lean into the topi colors because you're going to have your kitchen installed. A year's going to go by, you're going to start seeing all the magazines, or you're going to start seeing your Pinterest feed, you're going to start seeing your Instagram feed and you're going to go, "Why did I do that? I just put it in and it's looking like not so fresh anymore." So it's important to really know what those trends are.
You just touched on social in a few spots during that answer. One being TikTok does not make a trend, which by the way, I'm on board. And the other being the reassurance or the deterrence of the design choices that you're making over time through the social. So I'd love if you'd speak to social media a bit more and how you see its influence evolving over the next five or 10 years, for example.
Yeah, it's really hard to say how it's going to evolve over the next five or 10 years because what I can tell you for sure is it's not going to look like it does today. Five years from now, it's going to look very different. 10 years from now, the platforms we're on, maybe non-existent. They may be replaced by other things or the way we experience them is going to significantly change. One thing I know for sure is that technology is moving faster than we can even keep up with it. So that's going to be a constant, and it's on an exponential curve.
I mean, it's just incredible to witness, even when you look at AI as an example of that, and that's getting baked into everything that we touch online at this point, whether you think you're on AI or not, it's part of the search engines today. It's part of you're on Facebook. You want to make a post, you get an option right there at the bottom that says, "Do you want AI to edit this for you?" So you're on it, whether or not you believe you're an early adopter of this thing.
So I think social media is going to change significantly in the way we interact and engage with it will. But I love it. I think as a forecaster, it's definitely been part of the evolution of how we look at trends. It used to be, prior to the internet because that old, is we would get together a color marketing group with our peers and all share information on what palettes we're selling, where we saw the palettes evolving, what was being asked for by our clients that we didn't have in our lines yet, and what we were committed to bringing forward, and then we would dig into why. And so we would have these round table discussions. That's still very much part of how we forecast through that organization, which I'm a chair holder of, but what's happening is trends are moving faster, new ideas are moving faster, and they're saturating the market in a wider range than it ever used to because of social media.
So I think we're interconnected today in a way that wasn't possible even a decade ago, and we're getting influence from all over the world. And so I think it's become a really interesting and exciting time to be part of the design community to see where those influences come from. I mean, I follow people, designers from all over the world and artists from all over the world, and I get to see what kind of things they're doing and what kind of creativity they're able to bring to their markets and get new innovative ideas. So I think it's a great time to be able to lean into social for inspiration.
I love that. Speaking of trends in the future and all of these things, social, AI that have a hand in its evolution, as a trend forecaster, how do you leverage your expertise? And all of these external factors, of course, come along with that, as you just mentioned. They're sort of in our day-to-day life, whether we recognize it or not. How does that all come together when you're collaborating with brands to develop new products for them?
I think that's a great question. Doing the forecasts, and our studio is usually looking two years out as we're doing our research. So right now, we're working on our 2026 and 2027 palettes and material stories and colors so that we can bring them to our manufacturing partners early and make sure that we're ahead of the curve. How that impacts us is continuing to evolve. It's one of those things as we were just talking about, leaning into social media, understanding a little more of the algorithms, looking at new ways of finding the research has impacted us.
When I first started out, Pinterest didn't exist. Now we're looking at reports from some of these major online agencies that are saying, "Here's what consumers are pinning the most. These are the things that are most in people's psyche, the things that are exciting the consumer." Or we'll look at some of the online travel data and go, "Okay, here's where people are researching more often if we're doing research for the hospitality divisions. Here's where people are wanting to travel or here are the places that they're responding to the most." So that can guide the product development that we're doing.
I think we've also gotten smarter about understanding this principle that I recently read about called MAYA, which is most advanced yet acceptable. The reason that that's been important is, in the past, I would say my earlier days as a designer and a forecaster, I wanted to really push the envelope as far as I could. And I think the approach I was taking was almost a little more of an artist approach than a designer approach, which was like, here's the concept and here's the trend and here's where it should be. And when you bring product out in that manner, it only resonates with the early adopters, or it only resonates with the elite of the interior design trade who has a client who wants things that are so avant-garde and so different that they're willing to be the first to embrace it.
And what we found as my practice evolved over the years is that our different partners have different levels that they're selling to. It might be like a tile bar who's been a long-standing partner that sells not only to the trade, but they sell to showrooms across the country and they sell to some major retailers. Well, in order to get traction, we have to lean into that MAYA principle and bring them the most advanced yet acceptable concepts. So within the realm of the trends, and an example was art block tile. Subway tile is still a classic, right? No matter what, that's an example of an interior's product. That's a classic. That's not going to die. If you put it in, you're good, but how do you evolve that? So we brought fluted subway tile and elongated subway tile and subway tile that had a matte finish because that's where we saw the market going. So it was piggybacking off of things that would have more of a mass acceptance, and where people are excited, they feel like they're testing out a trend, but it's still within that comfort zone of being acceptable. So I think we've really evolved our practice over the years, not only where we're getting our information, but then how we're bringing that information to market in order to reach a wider audience.
That evolution is key. I'd agree. I mean, even myself, if I'm doing something for my home environment, I'm definitely probably more willing than most to take some risk, but you still want something to feel tried and true and everlasting or anchored in something that resonates with you. So I definitely buy into that and I love that.
Well, I have one more question for you, Stacy, and I don't know if you're going to answer it, but I'm going to try myself. So if you're willing to give us a sneak peek or just any forward look at something that's coming up for the studio this year, we'd love to be the first to know.
Oh, that's very exciting. Okay, fine. And it's funny, I didn't read the question, so I'm like, what are we talking about today? But we are really excited because we're actually just signed with a furniture company called Edgecombe. They have roots in the hospitality world, and we just put a deal with them together to bring upholstered furniture to Wayfair-
Oh, wow.
... so that consumers, yes, can have a little bit of the Stacy Garcia flair in their home. So I'm really excited. We worked with them also looking at the lens of trend, and the first grouping that we're bringing out has this beautiful almost fluted arm. I call it a little bit of a tulip shape. It's just sexy and yet feels classic at the same time. So it has this modern classic twist. I'm really excited to see the collection launch. And we haven't even published the press release about it yet. So you're the first.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Well, I'm so excited. Can't wait to see it. And I'm actually getting ready for some furniture buying, so it's well-timed. Well, thank you again for being with us today, and we can't wait to see what's to come.
Good, thank you.
If any of our listeners want to engage with the Stacy Garcia brand, either find her on socials or head to stacysgarcia.com.
Thank you so much for listening in with us today. We hope you leave inspired by the ideas in today's episode. For more, follow UpSpring on LinkedIn and Instagram. And don't forget to check out the amazing lineup of shows brought to you by the SURROUND Podcast Network at surroundpodcast.com.
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