Interior Design Internet Trends
When we started thinking about launching the Design Bloggers Conference back in 2009, it was simple to contemplate the interior design internet. There were the required designer, brand and traditional media websites, but blogs, Twitter and Facebook shook the ground. Design blog stars were born. Designer brands were built. National design brands scurried to find ways to intersect and leverage all these new content creators and their audiences. The excitement was palpable; a renaissance of sorts.
Today, the interior design internet persists as fertile ground for content marketing and brand building, but the landscape is inescapably more advanced and organized than during its earlier renaissance more than 10 years ago. Nonetheless, excitement and involvement with social media and blogging remains inescapable as Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and other fertile content sharing platforms contribute to the landscape. Lurking around the corner, though, is a digital reshaping of the way consumers, designers, and brands traditionally approach design projects or conduct brick and mortar commerce. Design entrepreneurs, along with venture capital and private equity funds, are stoking the internet with product and service marketplaces, photo sharing platforms, DIY design tools, reseller affiliate programs, and anything a designer once exclusively specified for their clients.
Last year, we added a separate two day conference track immediately following the Design Bloggers Conference. We named it the Home Design Digital Marketing Summit, born to help our industry navigate the changing consumer and trade patterns and emerge with sound business models. The conference content for those two days was ranked as the most compelling of all the sessions we produced that week. E-commerce, digital marketplaces, affiliate programs, and branding on the “new” web stole the show. The reason we launched the Summit as a separate track was to bring focused attention to the critical nature of these issues for every design professional; designer, brand, or retailer.
At the Beverly Hilton on March 5-7 2017, we are returning to Los Angeles where the Design Bloggers Conference was born in 2011-2013 before moving to the east coast. We recognize this as a compelling opportunity to weave these Summit topics into the Design Bloggers Conference to create one fully packed agenda so any design pro can can attend three days and get everything required to prosper as we tackle the digital transition of our industry together.
We feel like we are coming home, back to the warm embrace the local Southern California design community extended to our community of designer, brand, social media star, and blog content creators seven years ago. We are driven to put on our best conference ever and combining every piece of compelling internet marketing content under the Design Bloggers Conference feels like the right move for our broader design community.
The excitement we are feeling from our industry with our return to Los Angeles is overwhelming. Our planning team is further along with with the conference’s speaker, content, and social lineup than we normally are even three months before any previous Design Bloggers Conference. I am excited for all of us together who will embrace the opportunities and change the web has brought about and will choose to join like minded colleagues over three days in Los Angeles to learn, network, and socialize with the leading minds inside and outside our industry.