building an empire
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Amber Lewis is someone who has quietly ended up everywhere - in-store retail, big online retail, designing many beautiful homes, been featured in every magazine and blog you can think of, and has numerous brand collaborations.
She began with a few semesters of interior design school and worked for a couple of years as an assistant to another designer before establishing her own business.
And since then, she's built an empire from her casual California style, without the help of reality TV, all from Instagram.
She's one of those people I've long admired (and would love to meet, by the way, if you work for her) and have many times pondered, "How did you do all this?"
I found an interview from 2019 where she gave a talk at Google. It was important to me to find something from the past, not the present day, so that we could get into her head a little earlier in the game.
There is a lot of good insight here:
First, her dad was a contractor, and from an early age, she had “guttural responses to how I felt about my surroundings—and I still do.”
I really relate to this. I recall feeling visually bothered by certain aspects of our home when I was growing up, and pleased by the things in my grandparents' homes.
After dropping out of design school and working a comfortable job for another designer for a couple of years, she said she was "fired in the nicest way possible" and had to build her own thing.
She shares that people ask her every day about her goals in entrepreneurship and what her business plan was when she started out.
Laughing, she says, "I didn’t have a business plan—I had drive" and "I didn’t do it with 1% of my body—I did it with 140%."
It's something that seems familiar among many successful people. You don't necessarily know where you're going, but you have great instincts and apply the full force of your will to make something happen—a combo to be reckoned with.
Amber definitely has that classic entrepreneurial, never-satisfied quality, which I also possess in abundance. It's the oft-discussed tradeoff in the business world - success or satisfaction? Pick one. Amber says:
"I don’t ever want to be comfortable. Comfortable is scary to me.....I never quit. Still, to this day, I’m not happy with where I am."
One thing she said, and again, this is 2019, probably at the peak of the most recent wave of modern minimalism, was,
"Traditional, beautiful, classic design—you can’t go wrong...Brass and marble aren’t trends. You travel to Europe, and they’ve always been there. It’s classic.
Prophetic statement right there.
Another good one: "A house also needs to look as beautiful without the stuff in it." So true.
You can solve a lot of problems with paint, fixtures, and good furniture, but having an actually attractive, cohesive house to start with makes it so much easier (because you need less stuff!). Surprisingly rare today, and I'm always on the lookout.
Don't have time to write a long one today, so please go check out the full interview. Now, back to building that sauna... I don't want to get too comfortable.
