Why Two Designers With the Same Skills Charge Wildly Different Fees

Most pricing advice for interior designers starts with a spreadsheet. It should start with your brand. A design-world insider on what luxury brand strategy teaches us about fees.

You have seen it yourself. Two designers, similar experience, comparable portfolios, working in the same part of London. One charges £250 an hour and has a waitlist. The other charges £125 and still has to chase enquiries.

The difference is not talent or experience. It is everything that surrounds the work: the reputation, the referral network, the way they present, who recommends them, which tradespeople they work with, how their name comes up in conversation between an architect and a developer. It is the accumulation of signals that tells a potential client “this person is worth it”.

That is brand. And brand is what determines what you can charge.

Most pricing advice for interior designers starts in the wrong place. It starts with calculations: your overheads, your hourly rate, whether to charge fixed or percentage. These are useful mechanics, but they are not the foundation. The foundation is your position in the market and how you are perceived within it.

Why the standard advice falls short

The BIID surveyed designers in 2019 and found that 51% use a combination of charging methods, 21% use a fixed fee, 18% charge hourly, and 6% use a percentage of project cost. Eighty per cent do not publish fees on their website. These numbers tell us something important: the industry lacks consensus on pricing, and most designers are unsure whether they are getting it right.

The articles written to address this uncertainty almost all follow the same pattern. Here are six pricing models. Here are the pros and cons. Choose what works for you. They treat pricing as a technical decision, divorced from the business and the brand you are building around it.

What they miss is the thing that experienced designers already sense: your fees are not set by a formula. They are set by perception.

The connection between brand and price

There is a body of strategy in the luxury goods industry that applies directly to how interior designers should think about pricing.

Jean-Noel Kapferer and Vincent Bastien — Bastien was formerly Managing Director of Louis Vuitton and CEO of Yves Saint Laurent Parfums — wrote what has become the definitive text on luxury brand management: The Luxury Strategy (It’s worth buying). Their central argument is that luxury brands must break the conventional rules of marketing. What works for mass-market products actively damages luxury ones. Discounting, broad accessibility, competitive positioning, and price justification all erode the very thing that makes luxury brands valuable.

The relevance to interior design is immediate because interior design at any serious level is a luxury service. It is subjective, taste-driven, relationship-dependent, and impossible to commoditise. The “product” is not a deliverable you can compare on a spec sheet. It is an experience, a transformation, and the accumulated expertise behind it. That means the principles governing luxury pricing apply directly to how you set and present your fees.

Here are the ones that matter most.

What luxury brand strategy teaches interior designers about pricing

Your price should not be comparative.

Kapferer and Bastien argue that luxury is superlative, never comparative. A premium brand positions itself against competitors: “We cost more because we are better than X.” A luxury brand does not compare at all. It is what it is.

For interior designers, the practical application is this: the moment you benchmark your fees against another designer’s, you have entered the premium market. You have invited comparison. You have framed the conversation around “is this amount reasonable relative to alternatives?” rather than “do I want to work with this person?”

The designers I have watched command the highest fees over the past fifteen years do not discuss their competitors’ pricing. They present their own fees clearly, within the context of the work they will deliver, and the conversation moves to the project itself. The price is the price.

Selectivity increases perceived value.

One of the more counterintuitive principles in The Luxury Strategy is that making it harder for clients to buy can increase desirability. Luxury brands limit availability deliberately. Waitlists, by-invitation access, and geographical scarcity all amplify rather than restrict demand.

In design practice, this translates directly. Being selective about the projects you take, having a waitlist, and declining work that does not fit your positioning are not lost revenue. They are brand investments. They signal that your time has value and that working with you is not a given. Clients who engage under these conditions arrive with a different mindset than those who feel they are one of many options.

And your pricing should reflect that selectivity. If you are turning work away, your fees are probably too low. The market is telling you something.

Never justify your price. Explain what the client receives.

There is a distinction that changes how fee conversations feel. Justification says: “Here is why I charge this amount.” Explanation says: “Here is what you will receive.”

The first invites negotiation. It frames the fee as something that needs defending, suggesting it might be debatable. The second presents a scope of work alongside a fee, and the client decides whether the outcome is worth the investment. No defence required.

Luxury brands never justify. They do not explain why a piece costs what it costs relative to alternatives. They present the object, its provenance, its craft, and its price. The client makes a choice.

For designers, this means your fee proposal should not spend three paragraphs explaining why you are worth the money. Your portfolio, your reputation, your referral network, and the quality of the proposal document itself should have already done that work. The proposal presents scope, deliverables, timeline, and fee. Clearly, professionally, without apology.

Your brand must be known beyond your immediate client base.

Kapferer argues that a luxury brand needs many more people to recognise it than can actually afford it. This awareness gap is not a waste; it is the foundation of desirability and pricing power.

For designers, this has a direct application: press coverage, speaking engagements, a curated digital presence, and visibility within the trade. These investments may not convert to immediate enquiries. But they build the brand equity that supports your fees. When a client has already seen your work in a publication, heard your name from an architect, or encountered you at a trade event before they ever make contact, the fee conversation starts from an entirely different position.

This is why marketing is not separate from pricing. It is pricing. Every piece of brand visibility you build is money in the bank when it comes time to send a proposal.

Premium or luxury: the distinction that changes your pricing strategy

This is the part most pricing advice misses entirely, because it treats all interior design practices as the same kind of business. They are not.

A premium practice charges more than the average and justifies the higher price through demonstrable quality, experience, and service. The proposals are detailed. The fees are explained. The client understands precisely what they are paying for and why it costs what it costs. There is nothing wrong with this. It is how the majority of successful design practices operate, and much of the standard pricing advice serves it well.

A luxury practice operates differently. The fees reflect a level of demand, reputation, and exclusivity that makes justification unnecessary. The proposal presents scope and investment. The portfolio and reputation do the rest. The client is not comparing options; they are deciding whether to engage this specific designer.

Most interior designers are building premium practices, and that is entirely appropriate. But problems arise when a designer aspires to luxury pricing while operating with premium mechanics, or when a genuinely luxury-positioned practice undermines itself by adopting premium behaviours such as discounting to win a project or benchmarking fees against competitors.

The question that should precede every pricing decision is: what kind of practice am I building? Premium or luxury? The answer shapes everything from your fee structure to your proposal format to how you handle the client who asks for a discount.

The brand equity you cannot see on a website

Here is where the theory meets the day-to-day reality of running a design practice.

When I talk about “brand”, I do not mean your logo or your colour palette. I mean the full weight of what a potential client perceives and what they hear about you from others. And some of the most powerful brand equities a designer holds are invisible online.

Your network of specialist tradespeople, the builder who understands your standards, the curtain maker who delivers to your specification, and the joiner you have worked with for eight years, is brand equity. When a client asks, “Do you have good trades?” and you can name a team you trust completely, that is worth more to your pricing than any Instagram grid. It signals depth of experience, reliability, and the ability to deliver. It tells the client: this designer does not just draw beautiful schemes, they can execute them. And it is not something a newer designer can replicate, regardless of their fee structure.

Similarly, the architect who recommends you for a project is making a brand statement on your behalf. The developer who puts you on a preferred list is investing their own credibility in yours. These relationships are brand assets that create pricing power no website redesign can match.

This is why pricing advice that starts and ends with spreadsheets misses the point. The spreadsheet tells you your costs. Your brand tells you what the market will bear.

What this means in practice

Understanding the theory is useful. Acting on it is what matters. Here is where to start, depending on where you are.

This week: Look at your last three fee proposals. Not the numbers, the document itself. Does it read like a professional presenting a clear scope of work? Or does it read like someone making a case for being hired? The difference lies between luxury and premium positioning. If you are spending more space justifying than explaining, your proposal is working against your pricing.

This month: Audit the brand signals that surround your pricing. Your website, your portfolio curation (what you leave out matters as much as what you include), your social presence, your referral sources, your trade relationships. Ask yourself: if a prospective client encountered all of these before seeing my fee, would the number feel expected? Or would it feel surprising? If your brand and your pricing are aligned, the fee should feel like a natural extension of everything the client has already seen.

This quarter: Make the investments that create pricing power. These are not quick fixes. They are the things that compound over time: building relationships with architects and developers, earning press coverage, maintaining trade affiliations, speaking at industry events, and refining your digital presence. Each of these builds the brand equity that supports stronger fees. Not immediately, but reliably.

And if you are raising your prices, which you should be doing regularly, raise them for new clients first. Existing clients can be moved gradually, with notice. In practice, the clients most likely to leave over a reasonable increase are those whose projects were already underpriced.

The pricing conversation you should be having

Most of the discussion around interior design pricing focuses on models and mechanics: hourly versus fixed, percentage versus markup, and whether to publish fees. These are legitimate operational questions. But they are secondary to the strategic question that most designers never ask explicitly: what is my brand worth?

Because that is what your pricing ultimately reflects. Not your costs, not your competitors’ rates, not a formula from a business coach. Your brand. The accumulated perception of quality, reliability, taste, connections, experience, and trust that you have built over the course of your career.

If your pricing feels like a constant negotiation, the issue is probably not your rates. It is that your brand is not yet doing the work your fees require. And that is not a pricing problem. It is a marketing problem.

Which, as it happens, is something we know how to solve.

Frequently asked questions

Does publishing pricing help or hurt my brand?

The BIID found that 80% of designers do not list fees on their website. Whether this helps or hurts depends on your positioning. For a premium practice, a clear starting point (“projects from £X”) qualifies enquiries and signals transparency. For a luxury practice, the absence of published pricing can itself be a positioning signal, as it implies that each project is considered individually, which is part of the service. What damages any practice is opacity that feels evasive rather than deliberate.

How do I build the brand equity that supports higher fees?

Brand equity for an interior designer accumulates through several channels: the quality and curation of your portfolio, press and publication coverage, trade relationships and architect referrals, your network of trusted tradespeople, and the consistency of your professional presentation. None of these is a quick fix. All of them are compound. The designers commanding the strongest fees have typically been building these assets for years. Start now, and start with whichever channel you are closest to strengthening.

What is a fractional CMO, and would one help with this?

A fractional CMO provides senior marketing leadership on a part-time basis. For an established design practice that recognises the connection between brand and pricing power but lacks the in-house expertise to build it systematically, a fractional CMO can develop the strategy, oversee execution, and ensure that every brand touchpoint supports the positioning and the fees you are working toward.

How do I raise my prices without losing clients?

Apply new pricing to new clients. Move existing clients gradually, with notice and clear communication about what has developed in your practice. The more important question is: have you built the brand that supports the increase? A price rise backed by stronger portfolio work, new press coverage, expanded trade relationships, or a refined client experience feels earned. A price rise with nothing else changed feels arbitrary.

Is this relevant for suppliers to the design trade?

Entirely. Suppliers face the same brand-price dynamic. Two fabric houses with comparable quality: one is consistently specified at full trade price, the other gets beaten down on margins. The difference is rarely the product. It is the brand, the reputation within the design community, the ease of the specification process, and the relationships with designers. If you are a supplier finding that designers know your name but are not specifying your products, the gap between visibility and specification is a brand problem. Our Brand Score assessment is built to measure exactly this.