By Julie A. Palm
When Natalie Owens left the world of sales to start her own residential design studio, she knew she wanted to scale the business — and do it by nurturing the talented women she saw around her in Nova Scotia.
“We don’t have a university here (in Nova Scotia) for design at all. You have to go to Toronto and do a four-year program. … But what I was finding is that there are so many talented designers here in the Maritimes who don’t have formal training and never even thought they could make a career out of it. That was a really big opportunity because I always knew I wanted to scale. I never wanted to be a solopreneur. I wanted to create a team. And I thought, ‘This is great. There’s all this untapped talent and I’m just going to handpick people I think can be superstars.’ … And that’s what I did,” says Owens, co-founder and creative director of Stil James, a residential design studio based in Halifax. The firm’s name is a combination of her first child’s middle name (James) and the Danish word for style (Stil).
Her team now includes eight full-time staff, including Victoria Armour, her co-founder and business director, as well as several junior and senior designers, and procurement and project managers.
The firm specializes in residential renovations and new construction, with projects concentrated in Canada’s four Atlantic provinces: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, each with its own personality and design preferences. “We love the challenge of dipping in and out of those other three provinces,” Owens says.
The studio recently launched its own custom millwork company, Loran Cabinetry, in part, because Stil James found itself doing so many custom kitchens, Owens explains. The cabinetry company gives the design studio the ability to drop-ship into the surrounding provinces. The idea for the business came from a master class Owens took with Jean Stoffer, who has her Stoffer Home Cabinetry brand. “Jean is obviously the queen of that in the U.S. We had a call with her and it was extremely helpful,” Owens says. “It really helped us lay the groundwork for how we were going to roll that out.”
In what is now a tradition, Loran Cabinetry’s name is borrowed from the middle name of one of Armour’s children.
“She has three kids. I have three kids. We’re a very female-focused firm,” Owens says. “Our mandate kind of when I started was to bring women back into the workforce in a meaningful way. I was really passionate about having women here who wanted to grow their families while also being able to work in a way that wasn’t just part time or like a safety job. I wanted them to love what they do. … The two names (Stil James and Loran Cabinetry) are reflective of that.”
We talked with Owens about how she gets it all done, from her favorite vendors and average workday to an entrepreneurial group that helps hold her to account.
Design News Now: What items do you take with you to every client meeting?
Natalie Owens: My instincts. I’m highly gut-driven and I love people. … I can paint the dream for our clients in that first meeting, but at the same time, I have to be highly disciplined in understanding if they’re the right fit for us. That’s something I learned from listening to a ton of podcasts from other great designers like Ali Budd and Kelly Wearstler and Shea McGee, some of the greats. When you’re over that first hump of scaling, they all say the same thing: You’ve got to know when to say, “no.” That discernment is the thing that I have to take with me to every meeting because saying “yes” to the wrong client is a complete distraction for your team.
DNN: Is there a piece of software or technology you can’t live without?
Natalie Owens: We use Studio Designer to do all our design work … and we do all our product procurement through there. It was a recommendation from another designer in the U.S. and it’s been fantastic.
DNN: Who are some of your go-to sources for furniture and accessories?
Natalie Owens: We’re known for custom fabric and wallpaper, so Kravet and Schumacher are always on the call sheet for every project. We try our best to use local in terms of our large-scale furniture and custom furniture, so we work with Dockyard here in Nova Scotia, and they ship all across Atlantic Canada for large-scale custom furniture, sofas, sectionals, things like that. And then we love designing our own dining tables. There’s a woodworker here Redbeard Rustics Woodcraft. He is our favorite, always answers our calls. We do terrible sketches for him and he just brings these extraordinary dining tables to life for us. Our clients love them. Then Emtek on the hardware side of things. Hardware is really overlooked … it’s a must-have for us. … Then we have our go-tos like Four Hands and Sunpan.
DNN: Where do you like to shop for products?
Natalie Owens: My partner and I went to Maison & Objet last year and we also went to Italy to look at natural stone, which was phenomenal. … We really try to play in the European market. For specialty items, we’re really looking to the Europeans to kind of tell us (for instance) what’s happening in the tile world right now. … And I’m actually on Etsy all the time looking for hand-painted tiles and those little special pieces that clients are going to look at every time and say, “I am so glad I splurged on that because it’s my favorite thing in here.”
DNN: How do you like to structure your workday?
Natalie Owens: I get up and I get my kids ready for school. That’s my first priority. I have three young kids, and I don’t have any help at home, so the first part of my day is just about being present, getting them out the door, setting them up for their day. Then, we have a beautiful office that we acquired two years ago. The whole team is here working out of the office, and most of my day is spent troubleshooting and being the fixer on a lot of things. I get to do a little bit of design work, but as we grow, that becomes less and less. My role on a day-to-day basis is teaching and coaching and it really revolves around people — whether that’s clients, suppliers or the internal team. … When I get to do some design work, I certainly pick and choose things that I know I want to sink my teeth into. A lot of that comes when the kids go down to bed at night and I set up my computer and plug away for an hour or two hours. It’s quiet and I can design something that I love.
DNN: What is a strategic business decision you’ve made that really paid off?
Natalie Owens: We did something during Covid that really flipped the switch for us. We noticed that the midlevel contractors we were working with — not the design-build contractors but the ones specializing in renovations — were overworked because everyone was renovating their homes during that time. … As a group of women who all have young children, we saw an opportunity because, from a project management standpoint, there is no one better than a mother who has a gazillion things in her brain all at one time and is somehow managing to get it all done. So, we took that and used it as a selling point to contractors. We said, “We’re going to take (project management) off your plate and we’re going to charge for it.” A lot of them were no longer charging a project management fee or they didn’t have a bucket for that. Because we took that on, we were able to turn projects faster because everything was lined up. We developed a construction binder for them so that when they landed on-site … they had a binder there waiting for them that had every piece of product and that outlined every last detail of what they had to do — looking through the lens of the trades. … Even if the homeowner hired them separately and paid them separately … we were the quarterback of the group, which in many ways, made us sort of indispensable, and it took stress off the homeowner.
DNN: Where do you turn to for business advice or guidance when you need it?
Natalie Owens: I grew up with an entrepreneur for a father. He is in the financial industry and built his company from scratch. So, I was really lucky to have a front seat to watch that grind and see what is required if you want to scale and grow. And then I married someone that is obsessed with building businesses, who is this manic entrepreneur, so I also watched that ride and took the good from that, as well. Then I joined a group called EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization), a global group with chapters all around the world. I meet with six other businesspeople across all different industries. Nobody is in design necessarily, but people all have the same problems when you’re running your own business. That’s been hugely beneficial to me because it forces you to step outside of your day to day and look at things from 10,000 feet and say, “Where are my gaps and where am I going?” And it is an accountability group. They’ll say, “You said you were going to do this. Did you do it?” When you have a group of people every month holding you to that, you’re able to move the dial in a meaningful way. We tripled our revenue after year two and then we doubled it after year three. I think that was a direct correlation between focusing on where we are going overall versus just being in the work every day.
DNN: What is ahead for Stil James in the coming year or two?
Natalie Owens: I have always loved the product side of this business and that is definitely something we’ve already started to explore in a more meaningful way in the next 24 months. … We’ve really laid the groundwork on our brand, and we’ve got some credibility and some traction in our market. I think the next step for us is starting to curate some product lines for our clients and start to hopefully collaborate with some of the suppliers that we really believe have great product offerings. … If I could do both (residential and product design) that would be the dream.
Note: Header Photo by Carolina Andrade
