Passive Income: The Interior Designer's Holy Grail

Last week's post mapped the UK's 'Golden Zones' - the regions where disposable income is high enough to sustain a profitable interior design practice. Outside those areas, a thriving business remains possible, but the margin for error is smaller. This week's companion post addresses that reality directly: income streams that reduce dependence on a steady flow of client projects, and that can, over time, become significant in their own right.

Most writing on passive income assumes you already have a large, loyal audience. This post doesn’t. It’s an honest map of what’s viable, depending on where you actually are in your business.

Let’s start by retiring one word.

“Passive income” does a lot of damage. It conjures an image of a designer with 200,000 Instagram followers waking up to sales while she sleeps. That image isn’t completely false - but it’s the harvest of years of deliberate work, not a strategy most working designers can pick up next week.

And the word “passive” hides an important truth: none of these income streams are truly passive. Every one of them takes effort to create and some ongoing effort to maintain.

What they offer is decoupling: a break in the direct exchange of your time for money. Income that, once established, doesn’t require you to show up for every pound earned.

That’s worth pursuing at any stage. The question is simply which model makes sense for you right now.

Two models, one important distinction

There are two fundamentally different approaches to decoupled income in interior design. Mixing them up is why designers often try this, feel deflated, and decide it “doesn’t work”.

1) The brand-led model

This sells you. Your name, your aesthetic, your voice. People buy because they want your colour sensibility and your signature style.

It works - but it needs an existing audience. Digital products often convert at around 1–3%. To generate 100 sales, you may need somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 people to encounter the product. That traffic doesn’t arrive by accident. It’s built through years of consistent content, press, collaborations, or visible client work.

Brand-led decoupled income is, broadly speaking, a Tier 4 reward.

2) The problem-solving model

This sells a solution to a specific, searchable need. The buyer doesn’t need to know who made it. They have a problem (perhaps they need a client contract template, a colour palette for their north-facing Victorian terrace, a guide to briefing a builder) and they’re actively looking for help.

This model runs on search intent, not fame. And it’s available much earlier, because specificity (not popularity) is its advantage.

What actually sells (and why) - Four Filters

The common thread isn’t design expertise on its own. It’s pain relief the buyer recognises instantly.

• Saving money: a homeowner buys a £25 hyper-specific kitchen scheme with supplier links and “splurge vs save” options, and avoids costly mistakes.
• Saving time: a second-year designer downloads onboarding documents, trackers and proposal templates, and skips hours of reinventing the wheel.
• Making money: a designer pays for training on pricing, referrals or client acquisition because it directly affects income.
• Supporting progress: a designer buys a course on contracts or running a studio because it helps them step up professionally. A homeowner buys guidance because it reduces anxiety and helps them run a project competently.

These criteria come from decades of direct marketing research, there are others that could also apply to interior design-related products, e.g. reduce anxiety; build confidence; belong to something.

If your product idea only answers “it’s beautiful and reflects my aesthetic,” that may be necessary for brand-led products, but it isn’t enough on its own.

If it clearly hits one of the four filters, it has real commercial logic.

The models, calibrated by tier

Affiliate income: the lowest barrier, available from day one

If you already recommend products to clients, in blog posts, or on Instagram, you’re doing the work of affiliate marketing without being paid for it. Adding affiliate links is one of the closest things to “passive” income on this list, because it monetises behaviour you already have.

In interiors, the dominant platform is LTK (formerly RewardStyle). Commission rates are typically modest (often 2–8%) but a well-optimised evergreen post (e.g. “best sustainable paint brands”, “reliable British lighting suppliers”) can keep earning for years if it attracts search traffic.

The honest caveat: affiliate income scales with traffic. It’s rarely transformative on its own. As a layer on content you’re already producing, it’s one of the best effort-to-return moves available.

Best suited to: Tier 1 upwards.

Templates and tools for fellow designers: package what you’ve already built

Have you spent hours refining your onboarding questionnaire, fee proposal, specification sheets, room survey checklist, briefing documents? If you’ve been practising for more than a couple of years, the answer is almost certainly: yes.

Those documents contain operational intelligence. Designers in Tier 1 will pay to skip years of trial and error.

This is a problem-solving sale, not a brand-led one. The buyer doesn’t need to know your name. They need the tool, and they need it to be good.

These products sell on Etsy, Creative Market and Gumroad. Before building anything, use Etsy search to assess competition and demand, and spend 30 minutes with tools like eRank or Alura to check search volume and opportunities.

Best suited to: all Tiers.

Hyper-specific digital downloads: the long-tail advantage

Specificity is everything here.

“Living room design scheme” competes with thousands of listings. But a “whole-house Farrow & Ball palette for a north-facing Victorian terrace” answers a very particular question that a very particular person is already searching for. Smaller audience; higher conversion.

This is the long-tail principle applied to design. Designers with deep knowledge of listed buildings, small urban flats, rental properties, sustainable specification (or any defined niche) have an advantage because of their specialism, not despite it.

Viable product types include:

• room schemes for a specific style + property type (with clickable supplier links)
• palettes for orientations or property eras
• renovation planning guides for first-time renovators
• checklists for briefing trades
• guides to planning permission for common residential alterations

These usually save money, save time, or reduce overwhelm.

Best suited to: Tier 1 upwards (with genuine niche expertise).

Platform note: Etsy for consumer products; your own website for margin if you can drive traffic.

Validate demand before you build

Thirty minutes of keyword research can save months of effort.

• Google autocomplete: type the start of a phrase and see what people actually search.
• Google Keyword Planner: free inside Google Ads; shows search volumes and related terms.
• Answer the Public: useful for understanding the questions and anxieties behind a keyword.
• eRank / Alura: Etsy-specific search and competition data.
• Etsy search + reviews: see what’s selling, what people praise, and what they complain about.

Market research doesn’t have to be expensive. It just needs curiosity.

Online courses: where sequencing matters most

Courses are the highest-effort product on this list, and their success is tightly linked to audience size. Speaking from personal experience, the learning curve to launching your first course is steep, and the competition is fierce. Online courses have flourished as a result of increased uptake during the pandemic, the market is pretty saturated but the quality is (putting it politely) variable.

Sophie Robinson’s self-paced courses work because her audience existed first - built over decades through TV, magazines and brand collaborations. The course was the harvest, not the seed.

That sequencing point matters. Designers who create a course for an audience of fewer than ~1,000 engaged followers often feel disappointed, not because the course is poor, but because the maths doesn’t support it yet.

Platform economics matter too. Skillshare and Udemy offer discoverability - if you don't already have a large audience - but take significant revenue share and often discount aggressively. Many creators use them for lead generation rather than primary income, and high earners tend to publish at volume to benefit from platform SEO. I have courses on both platforms, their performance is poor: too much competition, and to be successful there, I'd need to devote more time to nurturing that platform - like adding another Instagram or LinkedIn to the list of marketing activities. 

Best suited to: Tier 3+ for consumer courses; Tier 2+ for designer-to-designer training.

Udemy/Skillshare case studies: Lisa Bardot of Bardot Brush is a real inspiration here. She's not an interior designer, she teaches Procreate (BTW best value app ever), she has built a really spectacular business. Likewise Daniel Walter Scott of Bring Your Own Laptop who teaches Adobe software. My hunch is that Lisa Bardot sells Procreate brushes to customers who find her on Skillshare, while Daniel Walter Scott fills his membership with customers who find him on Udemy. 

Hosting courses: Kajabi/Thinkific for margin control; Skillshare/Udemy only with realistic expectations.

Pre-designed room schemes: the “designer-as-product” model

This model is having a moment for good reason: a beautifully produced PDF room scheme (mood board, layout guidance, paint codes, product list with links, styling notes) that the buyer follows like a recipe.

Alice Grace England has announced that she'll launch this style of product. 

It’s aligned with what designers already do and it can sell repeatedly. The buyer saves money, saves time, and borrows a trusted aesthetic.

But there’s a constraint: this only works when your aesthetic is desirable enough that people want your interpretation, not simply “a competent one”. That’s not criticism. It’s sequencing.

You also need to be careful here. If you are a Tier 4 designer, exhibiting all the Tier 4 traits of being exclusive, not too accessible, with elevated positioning, this kind of diffusion marketing may not sit well with your core activities. Your elite clients may not like it. 

Best suited to: Tier 4 (or late Tier 3 with a strong, defined aesthetic and an engaged audience).

Paid subscription newsletters: the Substack opportunity

A paid newsletter can become surprisingly meaningful, recurring income. Substack is compelling because subscribers opt into your writing directly, instead of relying on social algorithms.

Kate Watson-Smyth is a clear British example, using Substack to offer both free and paid value: paid subscribers get deeper posts, interviews, curated trade sources, and live clinics.

The numbers are worth noticing. 200 subscribers at £7/month is £1,400 recurring income. 500 is £3,500. The marginal cost of an extra subscriber is close to zero. Kate Watson-Smyth mentioned 700 paid subscribers after 10 months on Substack, so, at that time, £4,900 per month.

The honest requirement: this works for designers with an editorial voice, consistent output, and a point of view worth paying for. It’s not the same as a project blog.

Best suited to: Tier 2+ for strong writers with trade knowledge and a genuine perspective.

Product licensing and royalties: the most decoupled model

Licensing is structurally the purest form of decoupled income. You license your aesthetic to a manufacturer and receive royalties (often 5–15% of wholesale) on each unit sold.

In the UK, Sophie Robinson’s collaborations are prominent examples. In the US, designers such as Athena Calderone and Sarah Sherman Samuel operate equivalent models.

This is firmly Tier 4. Manufacturers license a name and aesthetic when that name drives commercial interest.

Best suited to: Tier 4.

Paid advertising: bypass the audience problem entirely

Up to now, most models have assumed you’re building an audience. Paid advertising changes the game. It means you can create a product (e.g. a hyper-specific guide, a template bundle, a short course) and put it in front of targeted strangers without waiting years for followers, subscribers or Google rankings.

In principle, the mechanics are simple:

• create a product
• run ads on Meta (Facebook/Instagram) or Google to a sales page
• monitor whether revenue exceeds ad spend
• increase ad spend once the concept is proven

Early on, the aim isn’t huge profit. It’s break-even or a favourable return on ad spend. If £10 of ads reliably produces a £20 sale, that’s not “quit your job” money, but it’s proof of a working system you can scale.

The important reframe: in this model, the expertise that makes it work is not interior design. It’s marketing. The product is the vehicle. Ads are the engine. A brilliant product with weak ad skills can still fail simply because it isn’t seen.

Meta ads are often the starting point for designers because lifestyle and home products suit the platform well, but the learning curve is real and the interface changes regularly. If you want to go down this route, education first is the sensible sequence.

A practical approach:

• start with a small daily budget (£5–£10)
• treat early spending as tuition
• test creatives, headlines, audiences and price points
• use the data to refine the offer

Google Ads is different: it captures existing demand (people already searching). Meta creates demand (interrupts the scroll). Both can work.

The honest caveat: this route requires testing budget, tolerance for early losses, and willingness to learn ads as a discipline. Ads aren’t a magic button. They’re a skill. I took an inexpensive workshop with Zach Spuckler to learn, it was fantastic value, and delivered a basic understanding (Meta ads are complicated!). Look out for his 5-day workshop.

Best suited to: Tier 1 upwards, if you’re willing to learn the platform before scaling spend. Your product still needs to pass the four-filter test, because paid traffic is unforgiving. And the side benefit? You might grow your following too. 

Decoupled income by tier: the honest map

The designers who build successful decoupled income streams aren’t always the ones who waited until they were famous. They’re usually the ones who packaged their expertise early and allowed it to compound alongside reputation.

Here's how all this works out as part of my Tiers Model. 

Tier 1 - Startup

Start with affiliate links and simple tools/templates on Etsy. Validate demand before you build. If you’re willing to learn ads, a small product plus a modest daily budget can work without an audience…but expect this to be a learning phase first. This may be too much to ask, as your whole life is about learning at this stage.

Your products at this tier: tools that save fellow designers time or help them make money.

Tier 2 - Growing Pains

Your operational knowledge is stronger and your niche is emerging. Hyper-specific consumer downloads become viable. If you’ve tested ads and found a working return, Tier 2 is when you scale deliberately. If you write well, Substack can also become interesting here. Build your email list.

Your products at this tier: tools that save homeowners time, money and anxiety, plus education that helps designers progress.

Tier 3 - Maturity

Your credibility is established, your positioning is clear. Courses become viable if aimed at a well-defined audience. Substack can become a meaningful income stream. Your email list is now an asset you can activate.

Your products at this tier: training that helps people make money, save money at scale, and build confidence.

Tier 4 - Stardom

Brand-led income becomes viable: pre-designed schemes, licensing, large-scale course businesses, media-supported subscriptions. This is the harvest. Look to Sophie Patterson to see how visibility can feed multiple business opportunities.

Start where you actually are

The biggest mistake in this whole conversation - in any interior design business conversation! - is applying Tier 4 strategies to a Tier 1 or Tier 2 reality.

A designer building a course for 800 followers isn’t failing because the course is bad. They’re failing because the sequencing and the conversion maths don’t support it yet.

The good news is that decoupled income exists at every tier. It simply takes different forms. At Tier 1 it might be a client contract template selling quietly on Etsy. At Tier 4 it might be a royalty statement from a manufacturer.

The designers who get this right aren’t always the ones with the biggest audience. They’re the ones who started early, stayed specific, and asked one simple question of every product:

Does this save someone time, save them money, help them earn more, or help them grow?

If yes, build it.

If not, build the audience first.