If you've ever stared at a rusted shelving unit or an out-of-place love seat and thought about all the different things you could change, chances are you're a DIYer. Or, maybe you hoard Mason and Ball jars with the intention of turning them into lighting fixtures. Whatever your object of choice, the DIY movement has become as prevalent in the design world of today as wallpaper was during the 1980s.
As the audience for interior and exterior design evolves, so has the method for reaching them. We live in a digital world where mobile technology, social media, and online videos rule. This, in turn, is changing the way we all watch television - we're cutting the cord and subscribing to online streaming services for our entertainment, becoming an on-demand society thanks to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc.
Which is why, when you decide to start a project, you don't necessarily turn to your television for instruction. Instead, you seek out the information from the one place where it's readily available in all formats: the Internet.
Enter the latest intriguing entry into the space: The Design Network.
While sitting at a roundtable furniture industry discussion in Richmond, Virginia, Jason Harris, heir to one of the largest furniture showrooms in the United States, realized there was a vast disconnect between what industry leaders were focused on and what their target audience actually needed. "What was being depicted from our industry," he says, "was simply not what I knew, which is an industry of fashion and style."
That same evening, Harris began work on what would become The Design Network, hoping to hit a nerve with consumers and designers yearning for quality content about "all things home." With a focus on content curation, TDN is the first ever crowd-sourced, broadband television network and online community for both professional interior designers and the modern DIY crowd.
"We envisioned a complete reverse of how traditional TV programming had been done by allowing the crowd to influence and direct our programming, and to open the doors wide to creators to share their passion for all things HOME. This gave birth to The Design Network..."
What Harris has done in the first 18 months of TDN -- he calls it its "beta" phase -- is take the traditional home and garden design market and turned it on its head. The community leverages the expertise of designers - who believe television no longer offers a realistic depiction of their craft - and home enthusiasts to create and launch informational content, as well as share their products and work-specific links.
"I believe that a lot of designers are now seeing the value of video, and the value of having it in a structured, organized space as opposed to the chaos of YouTube. It's good for their businesses."
The combination of experts and media formats creates a channel where interesting and useful content helps designers connect with target audiences and not only share their brands, but their stories as well.
"Home and decor content has been largely abandoned by traditional media, so enthusiasts are hungry for this type of programming," says Sara Lynn Cauchon, the longtime home and garden TV producer and host of the network's new "Neat Freak" show. "The Design Network is perfectly poised to fill this gap with a consistent flow of high-quality video from trusted design experts."
Like many of the other talented contributors to TDN, Cauchon's previous experiences with lifestyle television make her a recognizable face and TDN uses the inherent popularity of its contributors to promote channels and bring in viewers to its programming. "They've got viewers that want to watch the content," Cauchon adds, "talent that wants to make the content, and, most importantly, advertisers that want to pay for the content. It's an ideal business model."
Lessons Learned & Forward Thinking
Harris is the first to admit that he underestimated what it would take to create a custom software platform from the ground up - especially one like TDN, which combines television, UG content, and social media. The first two years of the project were full of trial and error.
Harris also didn't realize at the start of the project that "most great designers don't currently leverage the medium of video" and that they might actually "be intimidated by it because they want anything they touch to reflect well on their personal brands." Harris, therefore, had to educate the design community on not just how to use TDN, but on the importance of video as a part of it.
Online videos are relatively cheap and easy to create, making it a viable market for those who want to share their knowledge but don't necessarily have the budget to do so via TV. That's why so many YouTube and Vine users have become Internet sensations. Piggybacking on that type of success, TDN currently offers 16 web series from designers and home enthusiasts - the exposure is good for their businesses and the built-in tools allow them to share their products and the links they're using - not to mention videos are fun and allow the talent to "bring life, creativity, emotion, and personality to [their] work."
"Plus, they like the idea that they could become a 'star' of their own TDN series and receive funding, professional packaging, and promotion for their concepts."
Beyond the lessons learned from these first two years, Harris would like to see a worldwide adoption of the TDN platform as the "go-to resource for entertaining, informative, and inspirational video content for all things HOME." He'd also like to see the growing community expand even further, to see it connect with distribution partners, and to see the content itself continue to "evolve and improve to the highest quality interactive television content available."
A Passion for HOME
A social network, connecting designers with their audience through an interactive medium - that's the same concept that's fueled other online communities like Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The Design Network is building a platform on the single idea that your HOME is important - it's where you spend most of your time, which means it should be a space where you feel comfortable.
"I just want people to want to learn more and share more about living a better life at HOME...we hope that The Design Network becomes that resource to elevate what home is and can be. It is, after all, the most intimate space in our lives."
Throughout TDN's beta phase, the network continued to see growth, which Harris finds encouraging. He enjoys seeing new content creators come along and leverage the platform to share their knowledge and their passion, and watching the relationship between users and the designers evolve so that people are engaged enough to comment and share. It'll be interesting to watch where the site goes in the next two years.