Ready for an inspiring journey through Rebranding and growth? In this episode, I chat with Michaela Burns, who recently rebranded her company while simultaneously building a brand new home – talk about a large undertaking!

Michaela reveals the thought process behind her initial company name, why she outgrew it after almost 10 years in business, and the reasons she shifted to a personal brand. Discover how she honed her skills on the job, refined her service offerings, and expanded her team. Michaela also discusses the addition of a “body double” and her goal of reaching a broader audience.

Dive into the challenges of rebranding, including the most frustrating aspects and the crucial role confidence played in her plans. Michaela shares why she chose to become her own dream client when selecting her architect and the importance of aligning with people you genuinely want to work with. By the end of this episode, you’ll be energized and inspired by Michaela’s story and her intentional approach to business and design. 

Episode Highlights
  • Michaela began her career in staging, which helped her develop quick space-planning skills.
  • Her first major decorating project was for a client she met while staging, who encouraged her to start her own business.
  • Michaela eventually rebranded her company to “Michaela Burns Interiors” as she grew more comfortable using her own name.
  • The rebranding process, while challenging, allowed Michaela to create a brand that truly represents her business and personal style.
Episode Resources

Read the Full Transcript ⬇️

Rebecca Hay: Hey, hey, hey, it’s Rebecca, and you’re listening to Resilient by Design. Today I’m interviewing my friend and decorator, designer supreme Michaela Burns. Michaela has over a decade of experience in the industry. She has been celebrated with multiple awards at the NKBA, and she’s been featured in magazines. Her work speaks for itself. She’s the owner and principal designer at Michaela Burns Interiors here in Toronto.

But let me tell you something. That was not always the name of her company. In fact, for the first eight or nine years, she operated under a different name. Today, we’re pulling back the curtain, and I’m asking Michaela all the things like why did she rebrand? What was the impetus behind it? How did she decide to do it? Why now? What has changed? We talk about this beautiful new build home that she’s just built for herself, the architect, and how she picked the architect. How did she start from staging after going to design school and moving into decorating? Why is that a great place to start if you’re just starting out? This episode is for anyone who is ready to dive into launching their design firm.

We talk about how to come up with a name for your firm, why she did what she did in the early years, and why she changed it. We also talk about great ways to start out in the industry if you don’t have any clients yet. We talk about all things architects, working with an architect, how to find the right architect, and how working with really qualified, incredible architectural partners and builders has elevated her incredible ability to work on bigger and better projects. You guys are going to love this. You’re going to love hearing Michaela’s story and all the good sneaky peeks that she shares with us behind the scenes. Enjoy.

I’m very excited to welcome my friend, Michaela. Are you taking a picture?

Michaela Burns: I might be. I might be.

Rebecca Hay: That’s amazing. I love it. Well, I’m going to take one of you too when you’re not expecting. I’m joking. Okay. All right, guys. Hi. Welcome. Welcome to Resilient by Design. Michaela, I’m so excited to have you here. Can you please introduce yourself to my audience?

Michaela Burns: Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. I’m super excited to be here. So I am Michaela Burns. My company name is Michaela Burns Interiors, but that’s all part of the story that we’re going to tell today. We are a residential interior decor and design firm based in Toronto. The majority of our clients are based in Toronto and also their corresponding vacation properties.

Rebecca Hay: Love it. I’m so excited to have you here. I’ve been following along. I think we’ve been in business more or less the same amount of time, like about a decade, right?

Michaela Burns: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I started out on my own in 2015. I was working for somebody else for a few years prior.

Rebecca Hay: Yes, our stories are very similar. It’s funny. We have recently realized our stories are more similar than we thought. We both lived in Vancouver. We both have had so many we lived in the same building in Toronto. Right?

Michaela Burns: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Before we knew each other, which is super cool.

Rebecca Hay: When I first found you, I don’t even know how or where. It’s probably through Instagram. You had a different company name. And so I’m really excited to dive into it. You’ve had that same company name for 10 years until very recently. I think it was last year you did a rebrand and not only changed the vibe, look, and color but the actual name of your business.

So guys, you’re going to like this. I can’t wait to dive into all these things. Before we get to the branding and the renaming of your business and all the things that you do, can you just give everyone a little bit of insight into what was it like in the early years when you first started your design firm? What type of projects were you doing? What was the name of your company? What was the decision behind that name and all the things?

Michaela Burns: I went back to school to take interior decor at George Brown starting in 2011. It’s a two-year program. I think it took me about three years. I had my first kid in there somewhere, and in the second year of the program, we took a business class in which we had to come up with our business name and start to put together business paperwork. We did invoices, purchase orders, and we mocked up the full paperwork of a project to get a little bit more familiar with it. So I came up with the idea for my business name at that time called Mint Decor. Little did I know the impact that’s going to have on my business, right? Because you start to make connections during design school, and you start to take on jobs. So you just use this name that you did in your business class.

But the reason I started with the name Mint Decor was in 2011-2012. My name is Michaela Burns, but I had only recently been married. I was married in 2010, and I took my husband’s name. For the first 29 years of my life, my name was Michaela O’Connor. Here I am potentially starting a business under this name Michaela Burns, and it just didn’t feel like my name yet. Burns did not feel like my last name. Also, in 2011, when you were telling somebody your company name, they were finding you by typing out a URL. They weren’t following you from Instagram to the extent that they are now. I also had grown up with a first name that nobody could spell. Therefore, I thought if I’m telling somebody my company name is Michaela Burns, are they going to be able to find me again? Those were kind of the two factors that led me to pick a company name that wasn’t my own name and was something very recognizable and easy to spell. I also always enjoyed the color mint green, and I thought that it reflected what my brand felt like at the time, which was approachable and fresh.

Rebecca Hay: I love that.

Michaela Burns: Lucky for me, mint has maintained to be a very popular color throughout all the trends, so I didn’t outgrow the name because of the color. It’s actually a kind of a funny story how I outgrew it. All that to say I started with this concept of Mint Decor, and it just stuck with me. As I graduated from school, I first started by working for another company called Modern Staging Modern Spaces in Toronto. So my own name wasn’t important. I was just a contractor billing to her. After working for that company for about two years, I was staging homes for sale and also doing some design work. That was a really great transition for me because when you work for a staging company, you learn how to decorate a space really fast.

You’re using a very limited toolkit, right? You’ve got a warehouse full of a pretty generic set of furniture, and you are not personalizing this home for a client. In fact, you’re doing the opposite when you’re staging, right? You’re depersonalizing. But it gave me the skills to walk into a room and quickly, like a puzzle, figure out, “Okay, if this is where the sofa is going to go, then this is the TV and this is the dining table.” It was a great way to hone the skill of space planning on my feet. About halfway through the time working with the staging company, we staged a home for sale for a client, and we got along with her really well. So she then hired us to decorate the new house that she purchased. That was my first big decorating job, and I still keep in touch with this woman who was the client. She, I think, was an angel sent from heaven because she had a really interesting art collection. She had eclectic personal style. She just brought us in and really gave us the opportunity to show our skills, and she was collaborative—a dream client. Near the end of the project, she pulled me aside and said, “You don’t need this company anymore.” The company I’d been working for, she said, “You have proven to me that you’re ready to do this on your own.”

Rebecca Hay: Wow. That’s amazing. How did you feel in that moment?

Michaela Burns: I was on cloud nine. Absolutely. As a little aside, a really serendipitous moment of all of this is she was moving out on her own because she had just been divorced. In that exact same moment in time, my sister, who had just graduated law school, was given her first big break with an articling job at her dream firm, and it was from the ex-husband. So this couple had both given my sister and me these starts to our careers without any knowledge that it was happening on the other side of the city.

Rebecca Hay: Oh my gosh, I hope you share this episode with this couple because that’s amazing. I love hearing that. I also love that you started with staging, which by the way, sidebar, my first job out of design school was with a home staging company as well. It was in Vancouver. Now I’m getting goosebumps. This is so weird. We can talk about that offline. It’s so interesting, but I do think it’s interesting because we do have a lot of stagers who listen to this podcast and a lot of stagers who get asked

to do more and more. Sometimes people start out staging, and it can really catapult you into decorating. So tell us then what happens next.

Michaela Burns: So I had this experience with this one client. It was my big project, and from there, I decided, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to make a go of it on my own. I had a pretty good network of potential clients and friends through my school connections, and then just through working in the industry and going to showrooms, you meet people. I launched my business, and I really just used the Mint Decor name as a continuation of what I had done in school. It was a low barrier to entry to the design business because I didn’t have to sit down and plan out who am I. I just used the business name that I had created and went with it. Over time, I realized that the name wasn’t serving me in the way that I wanted it to. You start to grow into your name and become more comfortable in your own skin, and I was at a point where I didn’t need the anonymity of it anymore.

Rebecca Hay: You didn’t need to hide behind it.

Michaela Burns: Yeah, exactly. I was ready to be Michaela Burns, and I was ready to stand behind my work with my own name on it.

Rebecca Hay: That’s a great place to get to in life in general, right? Just to be like, “Hey, this is me. This is who I am.”

Michaela Burns: Exactly.

Rebecca Hay: I love that. So, yeah, I did rebrand two years ago, and it was for that exact reason. It was just that I had grown out of the previous iteration of my company and into the new one. I think that’s very relatable for a lot of designers and decorators who start out and don’t know exactly where they want to go. You started your company because you just wanted to do what you love. You just want to do design, and you’re like, “Yeah, sure, here’s the name.” And then you’re like, “Wait a second. Now this is taking off. This is becoming real.”

So, do you think that changing your name and rebranding is something that designers should do earlier in their careers, or do you think you really need to wait until you’ve got your footing? I’m sure people are listening and are like, “Oh gosh, maybe I should change my name.”

Michaela Burns: I don’t think that it’s necessary to make a big name for yourself or have everything perfectly figured out from the get-go. When you’re starting out, you just need to get to work and put the hours in and meet the people, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go through that process until you’re ready. However, it can be an incredible boost to your business when you do go through the process of rebranding and coming up with a new name. It forces you to take stock of everything you’ve accomplished and what you really want your company to represent moving forward.

Rebecca Hay: I love that. What would you say was the biggest challenge in that whole process of rebranding?

Michaela Burns: There were a lot of challenges, for sure. I think one of the biggest challenges was deciding on the new name. It took a long time to find a name that I felt represented my business well but was also personal to me. And of course, there are the logistical challenges of updating your website, your social media, your contracts, all of the things that come with a name change. But at the end of the day, it was all worth it because the new name and brand really reflect who I am and what my company is about now.

Rebecca Hay: Absolutely. It sounds like it was a really worthwhile process for you, and I’m sure it will inspire others who are considering a rebrand. Michaela, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I know our listeners will find so much value in hearing about your journey and the lessons you’ve learned along the way.

Michaela Burns: Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. It’s been great to chat with you and share my story.