Walk any major design market. Scroll through Material Bank. Sit through a product presentation.
There is no shortage of products. Beautiful ones. Innovative ones. Technically superior ones. And yet — so many of them are forgotten before the rep has even left the showroom.
Not because they aren’t good. Because nobody explained why they matter.
Here’s what most product brands miss: by the time a designer is sitting in front of you, they’re not really looking for a product. They’re looking for the next chapter of a story they’re already writing — for a hotel client, a developer, an F&B operator, a brand that’s trying to feel like something specific to its guests.
Designers are storytellers. The best ones in hospitality are some of the most strategic storytellers in the entire built environment. Every project is a narrative — about a guest experience, a sense of place, a brand point of view — and every product they specify either reinforces that narrative or quietly undermines it.
I’ve spent years working with interior product companies on exactly this problem — and before that, I was in B2B sales for one of the world’s largest interior product manufacturers. I was in the rooms. I watched brilliant brands hand their teams a product and a revenue target, then send them out without any of the tools designers actually needed to plug those products into a real design story.
The gap between a great product and a specified product is almost never about quality. It’s about story.
On the Thrive In Design Podcast, I’ve talked openly about this: many brands think they have a visibility problem, when the real issue is something deeper — a strategy gap (Podbean) Designers are forming opinions about your brand long before anyone walks through the door. And if your story isn’t clear, consistent, and compelling across every touchpoint, designers won’t be able to use it. They’ll move on to a brand that gives them something they can actually weave into a presentation.
The Numbers Make the Stakes Clear
Before we talk strategy, let’s talk about why this matters so much — for designers and the brands they specify.
The average interior designer carries 40 times the specification purchasing power of the average American consumer. For designers at top firms, that number climbs to 140 times. (Thinklab) These are not casual buyers. They are highly influential decision-makers who are constantly evaluating both the product and the story behind it — and doing most of that evaluation without the brand present.
ThinkLab research shows that for 85% of specifiers, the number one fear is making a bad choice for the client. (Thinklab) Read that again. Their primary driver isn’t finding the most innovative product. It’s finding one they can believe in — one they can confidently stand behind when an owner pushes back on budget, when a GM challenges durability claims, or when a contractor asks questions on the install.
In hospitality, that fear has a sharper edge. Hotel owners and operators measure success in guest reviews, RevPAR, and refresh cycles. A specification that fails — that fades, peels, off-gases, or simply looks dated three years in — becomes the designer’s reputation. Hospitality designers don’t just specify; they vouch.
That kind of belief doesn’t come from a spec sheet. It comes from story.
What I Mean When I Talk About A.C.E.
At Thrive In Design, every engagement I do with a client comes back to our proprietary framework: A.C.E. The Journey — Appearing, Consulting, Executing.
It’s a simple lens, but it cuts through a lot of noise. We put the designer at the center and ask three questions that most brands have never actually answered together:
If you’re a designer reading this, you already know which brands fall down where. You know the ones who show up beautifully at trade shows and then ghost you on lead times. You know the ones whose marketing tells one story and whose customer service tells another. You know the ones who give you a binder of features when what you actually needed was a single sentence you could use in a client presentation.
A.C.E. is how I help brands close those gaps — but it’s also a useful lens for designers to evaluate which manufacturers actually deserve a place in your design narrative, and which are just renting space in your sample library.
The most common strategic exposures I see in interior product brands today are visibility without positioning, sales messaging without narrative, and activity without a clear strategy. (Podbean) A brand can be everywhere and still feel invisible to designers — because it hasn’t given you anything to hold onto. Nothing you can repeat. Nothing you can use.
The Real Problem: Effort Without Alignment
The brands I work with are usually working hard. They’re at every show. They have reps in market. They’re posting content. And they’re still struggling to differentiate.
The issue isn’t effort. It’s alignment.
Marketing is running one story. Sales is running another. Product development is somewhere off in its own world. The result is a product that shows up everywhere and lands nowhere — which means designers can’t carry it confidently into a client meeting. You can’t tell a story you can’t piece together.
On the podcast, I come back to this constantly: no matter what’s happening in the market, if design thinking and the customer journey aren’t at the center, brands will fall behind. (Podbean) ThinkLab research shows that two-thirds of A&D professionals feel loyalty to brands they know and trust. (Thinklab) But trust isn’t built by any single team or touchpoint. It has to be consistent across the entire journey.
For hospitality designers, that consistency is everything. When the website, the showroom, the rep, the lookbook, and the sustainability page all tell the same coherent story, you can lift that story directly into your specifications, your boards, your client presentations. When they don’t, you have to do the brand’s storytelling work yourself — and most designers, especially in hospitality where deadlines are unforgiving, don’t have time to translate the brand’s mess into something a client can buy into.
From Features to Outcomes: How Designers Use Product Stories to Strengthen the Design Narrative
This is where I spend most of my time with clients. And it’s not about reinventing the product — it’s about reframing how it’s communicated, so designers can pick it up and put it to work in the story they’re telling.
Because here’s the truth: in hospitality, the designer is the primary storyteller. You are the one in front of the owner, the operator, the F&B director, the asset manager, the brand standards committee. You are the one connecting a product spec to a guest experience, a brand vision, an ROI argument, a sustainability narrative.
Durability isn’t interesting. But durability in a 300-key resort lobby where the operator cannot afford a refresh in three years? That’s a story worth telling. Sustainability is no longer a differentiator on its own — but explaining how a material contributes to healthier indoor air quality, in language a designer can hand directly to a wellness-positioned hotel during a presentation? That’s genuinely useful.
I’ve said this on the podcast more than once: selling interior products isn’t just about listing materials and specifications — it’s about crafting a compelling story that resonates with your ideal audience. (Apple Podcasts) The same is true for designers. Your product stays the same. The story is what gives it relevance to the project in front of you.
Here’s how the strongest hospitality designers I know use product stories to enhance their design narrative:
1. They start with the experience, not the product. Before a single SKU goes on a board, they articulate what the guest should feel in that lobby, that suite, that restaurant. The product story then gets selected and shaped to support that emotion — not the other way around. A leather hand-finished in a small atelier in Italy becomes part of an “intimate, residential” narrative. A high-performance fabric becomes part of the “we built this to live as beautifully in year five as it does at opening” narrative.
2. They translate every spec into an outcome the client cares about. Owners and operators don’t speak in CRI ratings or double rubs. They speak in RevPAR, guest scores, refresh cycles, brand standards, and ESG reporting. The best designers act as translators — taking the brand’s technical story and re-voicing it for the audience in front of them. A Greenguard Gold certification becomes “this is part of how we deliver on the wellness story your brand is staking its rebrand on.” A 100,000-double-rub textile becomes “this is how we protect your CapEx through the next refresh cycle.”
3. They use product provenance as a narrative anchor. Hospitality projects almost always need a sense of place. Where a product is made, who made it, what tradition it draws from — those details, when a brand provides them clearly, become threads the designer can weave into the larger story of the property. The brands that win specs in this category are the ones that hand designers usable narrative material, not just origin marketing.
4. They bring the brand’s story into the presentation room. The designers who consistently get specs approved aren’t just showing samples — they’re telling the client why this brand and not another. They quote founder stories. They reference design awards. They mention the line’s history. They use the brand’s own language about sustainability, craft, or innovation. When a brand has done its storytelling work well, the designer becomes its most powerful advocate in rooms the brand will never enter.
The distinction I keep coming back to with clients is the difference between informing and educating. Designers don’t want to be sold to — they want to be supported with story material they can actually use. Brands that position themselves as educators, that explain how their products perform in real-world hospitality applications and give designers context they can hand directly to their own clients, become long-term partners. When it comes to product, the most effective brands focus on strategy — not just features and benefits. (Thinklab) And partners get specified long after the campaign is over.
Designers Are Selling, Too — And Story Is What Makes That Work
The most important place all of this plays out is at the relationship level — between the designer and the client.
In hospitality, designers are absolutely sales people, even if no one calls them that. You are pitching a vision. You are defending a budget. You are walking an owner away from the cheaper alternative and back to the spec that protects the project. You are convincing a developer that yes, this textile is worth it, because here’s the story it tells about the brand you’re trying to build.
That work cannot be done with spec sheets alone. It needs narrative.
The traditional view of the brand–designer relationship — samples, specs, transactions — is no longer sufficient on either side. (Thinklab) The brands that succeed in hospitality know their job is to arm designers with story. The designers who consistently win the spec battle know their job is to take that story and make it land for this client, this project, this problem.
When a brand invests in giving designers real narrative tools — clear positioning, messaging that goes beyond features, stories you can actually use in client conversations — everything shifts. (Podbean) Presentations get more persuasive. Specs hold up under value engineering. The Consulting and Executing stages of A.C.E. start working the way they’re supposed to, because the designer can carry the brand’s story into rooms the brand will never enter.
If you’re a designer reading this and feeling like you’ve been doing the brand’s storytelling work yourself, you’re probably right. The good news is that gives you leverage. The brands worth your specification budget are the ones that show up with stories you can use — not just products you have to translate.
Story Is the Strategy
The brands that will lead the next era of hospitality design aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the broadest product lines.
And the designers who lead the next era of hospitality won’t be the ones with the most products in their library — they’ll be the ones with the strongest design narratives, supported by brands who give them real material to work with.
As I’ve said before: effective brand storytelling goes beyond aesthetics — it’s about creating immersive experiences that resonate with your target audience and influence specification decisions. (Colormarketing) That’s true in the showroom. It’s true in the design presentation. It’s true in every email, every rep interaction, every trade show activation, every concept board.
Great products get noticed. Great stories get specified.
In an industry where 95% of designers start their product discovery search online (Thinklab) and attention is already stretched impossibly thin, story is the competitive advantage on both sides of the relationship. It’s what makes a designer remember a brand, believe in it, and — when it matters most — choose it. And it’s what makes a client choose your design over the next presentation.
That choice is worth investing in.
Nicole Lashae Hall is the CEO & Founder of Thrive In Design, a design and innovation consultancy helping interior product companies grow through human-centered strategy, brand storytelling, and the A.C.E. The Journey framework. She is also the host of the Thrive In Design Podcast, a top resource for leaders in interior product companies. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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