My mind is blown by what today’s guest has accomplished: increasing her Instagram following from 2,000 to over 20,000 in about 6 weeks.

Though she isn’t an overnight success, Valerie Furazhenko ignored the typical Instagram angst and decided to concentrate on what worked and what didn’t to accomplish this impressive feat. She shares what precipitated a brand shift, the role Power of Process played, and the main elements she focused on with her social media posts. She talks about the three major pillars to keep in mind to create resonating content, how she used AI to help in her mission, and the actual tangible results that came after this count increase.

Valerie’s passion and excitement are infectious and I know you’ll leave this episode inspired and excited just like I did!

 

Episode Highlights
  • Valerie grew her Instagram from 2,000 to 20,000 followers in one month and now has over 34,000 followers.
  • She was honored with the NKBA 30 under 30 and the New Market Decorators Category Awards.
  • Valerie rebranded her company, focusing on consistency and content, authentic storytelling, and using reels and collaborations.
  • Engagement and showing the human side of the brand are crucial for growth on Instagram.
Episode Resources

 

Read the Full Transcript ⬇️

Rebecca Hay: Hey hey hey it’s Rebecca and you’re listening to Resilient by Design. Today I have an incredible guest. You guys are gonna love this conversation with Valerie Furagenco. We are talking about Instagram growth. She grew her Instagram from 2,000 followers to 20,000 followers in one month. It is an incredible story. You’re going to love hearing from her. She’s the sweetest accent. I absolutely love it. She is a badass businesswoman.** She studied business and fashion. She moved to Canada when she was 18 all by herself. And then she pivoted into interior design. She started her design business during the pandemic. Like many of our listeners, she got married. She has a two-year-old child. She’s done a lot in a short period of time. And this year she was honored with the NKBA 30 under 30 and the New Market Decorators Category Awards. After rebranding her business last year in 2023, she grew her social media following. As I mentioned from 2k to now over 33,000 followers. She collaborates with brands. She supports the community of designers. She’s a pop alumnus and she helps designers grow on Instagram. She has a course. And today she shared some really specific tricks that she has been using and what precipitated the complete rebrand. She renamed her company last year before she went crazy and went viral on Instagram. You are going to love this conversation with Valerie. Enjoy. Welcome to the podcast Valerie. I’m so excited to have you here. We’ve been trying to get you on the podcast for a little while. Welcome to Resilient by Design.

Valerie Furazhenko: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so honored to be here. I found out about you actually from the podcast in the first place. So I feel like it’s a full circle moment for me right now.

Rebecca Hay: That’s amazing. I love that. It was good to be here. Thank you. You’re welcome. And thanks for coming. And I’m excited to dive into all things social media today. It’s amazing to watch you from the sidelines and see what you’re doing. And I think our listeners are going to love this conversation. But before we dive into all those things, why don’t you just let everybody know a little bit about who you are and how we found each other?

Valerie Furazhenko: So my name is Valerie. I’m the owner and lead designer of Viola House. We are a small boutique residential interior design firm in Toronto. We work with clients worldwide. Now we met again, I found out about you on the podcast but then I was one of your POP students. I took your POP course which I absolutely loved. And it was amazing. I still brag about it and recommend it to everyone. So that’s my absolutely honest recommendation. We rebranded last year. My company rebranded last year. We had a whole new chapter in our business. And since then we started focusing really on social media and really implemented it as a part of our business instead of being just somewhere on the sidelines. It’s an actual revenue stream for us now. And we saw an exponential growth in the last few months. It’s been life-changing and I’m excited to talk about it.

Rebecca Hay: Okay, so here’s from my perspective. I knew you inside POP. For those of you who don’t know, Power of Process has a live component meaning that we show up on Zoom and I get to see people’s faces and answer questions. So I got to see your face. And of course, I would see your comments in the Facebook group. And obviously, I start following all my POPers on Instagram. You had a different company name. Your name was Valerie Lush Interiors, I believe, correct?

Valerie Furazhenko: Yes.

Rebecca Hay:  Sorry, I can’t pronounce it.

Valerie Furazhenko: That’s one of the reasons for the rebrand because a lot of people mispronounced it and it was like okay, that doesn’t make sense. Maybe we can switch to something else.

Rebecca Hay: Totally. It’s so interesting. I’ve seen a few companies in the last little while rebrand and rename their company. Michaela Burns did the same thing. She used to be Mint Decor. She’s now Michaela Burns Interiors, which is so much more elevated already than I know Mint Decor, right?

Rebecca Hay: Amazing. So let’s just talk about it. Like what precipitated the name change apart from the fact that it was hard to pronounce. So what is your background? Like where does the pronunciation come from?

Valerie Furazhenko: It’s Russian.

Rebecca Hay: So you changed the name. What precipitated that? What made you decide to change your company name and rebrand? I want to talk about the rebranding part of it because you really did. It was like a 180 from what you were posting. If anyone scrolls back far enough, Valerie, it’s good.

Valerie Furazhenko: Please don’t. Half of it is actually deleted now.

Rebecca Hay: Oh, I wish you hadn’t done that. It’s always so inspiring for people to see where we start, right? You can scroll back and you can see. For sure. It stood out to me and I saw that you changed your name and I thought oh that’s interesting. And then I started to see the content and it was a completely I would say different aesthetic in a sense that there was a very consistent aesthetic. We’ll talk about the Instagram piece in a minute. But before we get there, why and what precipitated the change in the name and the brand?

Valerie Furazhenko: Besides the name being difficult to pronounce, a lot of people mispronounced it. So I had to explain it every time. The other aspect was that I felt like the type of clientele I was attracting was not really aligning with the jobs on the projects that I wanted to do. I felt that I was the girl next door who’s your neighborhood designer who’s going to help everyone out for your little projects, you know, with your DIYs and stuff like that. I wanted a little bit more, again, an elevated feel and a little bit more serious business. I didn’t want my name to be necessarily connected to it. I wanted a brand name and I wanted to create that brand awareness in a sense. So that’s where I came from. We’re very much more strict right now with the content. Before, it was all over the place. We had some consistency on the website but on social media, it was all over. The colors were all over, the fonts were all over, and there was nothing that was recognizable. Right now, I feel like if you see our posts randomly on the For You page, you might think, “Oh yeah, I know who that is.” So that was part of that as well.

Rebecca Hay: How long had you been in business under the previous name?

Valerie Furazhenko: So we started during the pandemic, so I’d say two to three years at that point.

Rebecca Hay: And what type of clients would you say you were attracting?

Valerie Furazhenko: So low budget, just small projects like a powder room or clients who are not ready to commit to a full-service design. They just want some advice. They want to do everything on their own. They want to shop around and get the best deal. That type of customer. I think we still have some of those and I’m not against working with them but the majority of people were just not aligning with what I was looking for.

Rebecca Hay: And how much would you say Power of Process played into maybe that realization?

Valerie Furazhenko: It definitely did because I did the course in the spring and half a year later we rebranded. So that was kind of a timeline. By the time I finished the course, we started the rebranding process. Defining the customer, defining the client was very crucial for us. That was part of POP. I’ve never done that before to the degree that I was doing it with you guys. So that was very helpful for sure, 100%.

Rebecca Hay: That’s interesting to hear. I’ve had so many designers say that. It’s funny how when we start our businesses, we sort of breeze over that aspect. Because we’re just so excited to do our work and do our craft and design. We’re just happy to probably cater to anyone, let’s be honest. When I started, I was just happy that somebody wanted to pay me to design. Exactly. Yeah. You just need a project. You just need to pay your bills. I love that that exercise had such an impact on you. That makes me really happy to see because really the outcome of that has been phenomenal. Okay. So let’s now talk about Instagram. So you grew I don’t know what your account was at before you rebranded. Do you remember how many followers you had?

Valerie Furazhenko: About 2,000 followers maybe 2,500. And it stayed like that for years.

Rebecca Hay: So it stayed like that for years and then you changed your company name in 2023, is that correct?

Valerie Furazhenko: Yeah, just last year.

Rebecca Hay: And so that’s at a time in the world where everybody was complaining about Instagram. Exactly. Everybody said Instagram is not what it used to be. You can’t grow on Instagram. The algorithm is totally messed up. There’s no hope. Find another platform. Move on. You ignored all of that, which I love. And where are you at right now? How many followers as of today?

Valerie Furazhenko: We’re at 34,000 followers as of today. So that’s pretty amazing. A year and a half later, it was a big jump for us. It was the time when everyone was starting to be so upset about Instagram. I love the platform. It’s the place where I can share my work, and my content, and connect with people. I still love it. It’s the biggest platform for us right now.

Rebecca Hay: I mean, you have 34,000 people. That’s huge. How do you do that? Let’s break it down because that is probably the biggest growth that I have heard of, from a design perspective especially. For somebody who started with just a small following, not that you had a tiny following, 2,000 is great. That’s a lot of people who are listening, who are dying to get to 1,000 or get to 5,000. And then once you hit 10, you’re like, “Ah, this is amazing.” So let’s break it down. How did you grow from 2,000 to 34,000?

Valerie Furazhenko: So I would say there are a few steps. I would say consistency was the biggest thing for us. Consistency and content that we’re putting out there. We started recording ourselves a lot more and just sharing stories. We wanted to share and just be authentic in the stories that we’re sharing. Not just say, “Oh, here’s our perfect project. That’s it.” But actually dive deeper into the process, behind the scenes, the lessons learned, the things that didn’t go well, and just be really relatable. People can relate to those stories and they can see, “Oh, okay, they’re actually like us. They’re normal. They mess up too.” So that was one of the biggest steps for us.

The second one would be the reels. Reels played a big part in our growth. Reels have a big reach right now and that’s a good thing to take advantage of. We didn’t do any reels before. We just started doing them consistently and we saw our reach growing and growing. So that was a big factor as well.

Rebecca Hay: Do you think there’s a difference between the type of content in a reel that gets the growth and the type of content that’s maybe more like people who are already following you will engage with? Because I find that my reels sometimes are more like what my followers want to see but they don’t necessarily grow my reach. Like there the two different types of content. What are your thoughts on that?

Valerie Furazhenko:100%. I would say that if you want to grow your account, you need to create content that will be shareable and savable. So think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know you. What would they like to see? How can they save it? How can they share it with someone? How can they engage with it in that way? So those would be the two biggest things for me.

Rebecca Hay: Okay, so the reels. How often are you posting reels?

Valerie Furazhenko: We try to do at least three reels a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But at least three reels a week is what we try to do.

Rebecca Hay: Wow, three a week. That’s amazing. So you’re consistently showing up, which is the biggest thing. If you can’t be consistent, I say don’t bother.

Valerie Furazhenko: Exactly. Consistency is key.

Rebecca Hay: So what else? You talked about stories. How important are stories to you? And are you showing your face on stories or are you just showing behind-the-scenes photos?

Valerie Furazhenko: Stories are very important to us. I think they help us connect with our audience on a more personal level. So we do show our faces a lot in stories. We do behind the scenes. We do a mix of everything. But I think showing your face is very important because people want to see the person behind the brand.

Rebecca Hay: I agree. I think that’s what makes you relatable, right? Because people do business with people they like.

Valerie Furazhenko: Exactly. And they can see that we’re normal people. We’re not just a perfect brand. We’re normal. We make mistakes. We learn from them. And we’re just like everyone else.

Rebecca Hay: That’s so true. I love that. Okay, so we’ve got reels. We’ve got stories. What else?

Valerie Furazhenko: I would say the next thing would be collaborations. Collaborations have been a big part of our growth. We collaborate with other designers, with brands, with influencers. And that helps us reach a new audience that we wouldn’t be able to reach on our own. So that was a big part of our growth as well.

Rebecca Hay: Can you give an example of a collaboration that was successful for you?

Valerie Furazhenko: Yes, we did a collaboration with a local furniture store. We did a giveaway together and that helped us reach a new audience. We gained a lot of followers from that collaboration. So that was very successful for us.

Rebecca Hay: That’s amazing. And that’s a great example of a local business, right? It’s not always about collaborating with another designer or another Instagram influencer. Sometimes it’s just about collaborating with a local business that has a similar audience to yours.

Valerie Furazhenko: Exactly. And it was a win-win situation for both of us. They got exposure. We got exposure. It was a great collaboration.

Rebecca Hay: I love that. Okay, so what else? What other tips do you have for growing on Instagram?

Valerie Furazhenko: I would say the last thing would be engagement. Engaging with your audience is very important. Responding to comments, responding to DMs, and engaging with other accounts. That helps you build a community and it helps you grow your account.

Rebecca Hay: I love that. So are you spending a lot of time on Instagram engaging with other accounts?

Valerie Furazhenko: Yes, I do spend a lot of time engaging with other accounts. I think it’s very important to build those relationships and to show that you’re not just there to post and leave. You’re there to build a community and to engage with your audience.

Rebecca Hay: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of these tips with us. I know our listeners are going to find this so valuable. And I’m just so excited to see where you go from here because I know you’re just going to keep growing and doing amazing things.

Valerie Furazhenko: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here and to share my story with you.

Rebecca Hay: Thank you, Valerie. And for those of you who are listening, I hope you found this as inspiring as I did. I hope you take away some of these tips and start implementing them in your own social media strategy. And if you want to connect with Valerie, you can find her on Instagram at Viola House. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time on Resilient by Design.