Pineapple Interiors

This morning Tammie and I had brunch with several of our stagers. What a nice morning it was! We enjoyed being with everyone in a more social situation and talked about all sorts of things, including staging!

It’s interesting and fun to hear about the triumphs, defeats, and often the comedy of staging. So many stories, so many styles, and such creative ideas on how to handle these situations. Getting together is such a terrific way to learn.

As the conversation flowed we all seemed to realize that this type of sharing is something we would like to continue.

In the next few months look for news from Pineapple Interiors about Real Estate Staging get-togethers that will help us all grow our businesses!

Everyone wants to have the best looking website right?  The kind of site that will really show prospective clients that you know your stuff.  The kind of site that has great pictures.  The kind of site that has just the right amount of verbiage to let clients know that you, and you alone are the obvious pick when hiring a stager!

We recently updated our website, spending countless hours writing and rewriting copy, placing just the right photographs in just the right spots, and designed graphics and colors to be appealing.  We concerned ourselves with easy navigation through the website, and tried and retried several things until we felt we had it just right.

The feedback we received from friends and colleagues has been important to us, and changes were made based on that feedback. Imagine our surprise when we were asked to come out and do a bid for a new client when he told us, he really didn’t want to call us because he thought our website looked too good! (He was interested in staging a very small fix and flip condo.) He thought we would be too expensive.  So there we were doing a bid, and trying to explain that the quality he saw on our website was the quality we give all of our customers, whether it be a small job or large, and the pricing we give all of our clients is fair and affordable to all types of sellers.

Just when you think you’ve got your prospective clients pretty well figured out——something unexpected comes along to keep you wondering!

Tammie and I recently attended a conference with stagers from all over the country. We met and talked with some very interesting and talented people who love their work. Listening to stories of “stagings gone wrong” made us laugh and learn, while hearing ideas of what works left us with energy and enthusiasm for jobs to come!

One thing we learned at the conference is that home staging means different things to different people, both consumers and stagers themselves. The creative profession that we are engaged in has loosely defined boundaries, that can have the tendency to encourage an anything goes type of policy.

While personal expression and creativity are a must for staging, we believe other musts should include quality and professionalism. Using what a homeowner has is certainly limiting at times; that is why they call us—to be the professional and determine what can and cannot be used in staging for a sale.

Our business, at Pineapple Interiors, focuses on vacant staging, an area we enjoy as it gives us a lot of latitude. It’s amazing how at the end of the day, a formerly empty home winds up having personality and appeal. As professional stagers, our first priority is to make sure that the personality the home takes on is a favorable one, allowing potential buyers to see the home at its best. Secondly, we feel a responsibility and commitment as  trained home stagers to keep the standards high. We want the public to understand that staging and quality go hand in hand, and that paying for a professional to come in, adds value that you cannot be duplicated simply by adding a few things found at a tag sale.

Budget of course is a concern, and keeping costs low is always a goal, and something that helps in securing future jobs! As professional stagers we are trained to have an eye for what looks nice. And as professional stagers we must cultivate resources for finding these products at reasonable prices. and at the same time convey to our clients that staging is a value added product, and one that is inexpensive, but not cheap. We need to make sure that we are staging in this fashion too.

It’s exciting to see redesign and home staging becoming familiar words to the general public. Making sure they are words associated with quality is important to us and something that we hope as a community of stagers we can work hard to promote.

We are happy to report that the implementation of Darby Inventory at Pineapple Interiors has been a huge success. It is a great feeling to know that all of our inventory is accounted for. We know where it is, how long it has been there and even how much revenue our inventory is generating. Our staging clients now receive a professional, itemized list of the pieces they are renting, which is helpful both for their records and to cross-reference the items to be delivered.

Since Darby Inventory is web-based, we can even pull together jobs when we are away from the warehouse. It also allows our entire team to access our inventory from anywhere at any time.

Regardless of the size of your inventory, Darby Inventory can be a great tool for your business.

We often receive calls from stagers or homeowners saying they have a very high-end property they are looking to stage and need high-end furniture. We have learned through the years that it is not the price tag on a piece of furniture that makes it appropriate to use in a home or not, it is the look of the piece, as well as the style, types and amount of accessories that are placed with it. In our opinion, you can get a great high-end look without the price tag of purchasing and renting expensive furniture. When we stage multi-million dollar homes, we feel that less is NOT more. We use terrific looking pieces that are affordable, which gives us the ability to use plenty of them. We also use lots of artwork and accessories, tastefully filling each room we stage. Pops of color and texture are added to give the home the designer look that prospective buyers in that price range would expect.

It has been a long time coming so I thought I would coincide our very first Pineapple Interiors blog post with our new and improved website. It has a whole new design and all new content. We are hoping to get more great information out to our clients, including realtors, builders, homeowners and home stagers. We would love to have your feedback — good or bad.

A great big thanks goes to Erin Conigliaro with e-design for the fantastic design and Ben Johnson for all the code help. I could not have done it without you!