Captiva Design

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Brief Company Description: Captiva Design is South Florida's premier Redesign Home Staging Company. We are the Interior Decorating and Home Staging choice for clients in the Broward, West Palm Beach and Palm Beach counties of South Florida wanting personalized service with attention to detail. We're known for effective communication and a high standard of professionalism for all client projects. We deliver quick result to Homeowners and Real Estate Professionals to sell the home quickly. To find out more about Captiva Design visit our website here.

​Owner: Bridget King

Selected Projects: Visit their website for more information on each project.

Tell us about Captiva Design

Tell us about yourself and Captiva Design. Hello everyone. My name is Bridget King from Captiva Design, Interior Decorating and Home Staging. Based here in sunny south Florida. I have been in business is now for just over 18 years serving our clients in both interior decorating, that's mostly nonstructural type of design work that we do. And then of course, home staging, which is a very large part of our business. And we stage everything and anything. We stage trailers, we stage houses, we stage yachts, we stage assisted living facilities. So, we don't just box ourselves in for residential home staging only, but we'll work with anybody who needs to sell some sort of a product and needs it to look great, right? Because we know that buyers, they buy with their eyes, they buy what they see. So staging is super important to what we do, and we absolutely love seeing the transformation. So that is Captiva Design in a nutshell. We are an interior decorating and home staging company.

What differentiates Captiva Design

What differentiates Captiva Design from other Interior Decorating and Staging Companies? So great question. Of course, like I said earlier, I've been in the business now 18 years plus. Started really as a home flipper. That was my background and then my business just evolved from that. But what makes my business model so unique and different? Because now the market is saturated with a lot of home staging companies. And what makes me unique is the curated services that I provide to my clients. So what that means is no two homes are alike, right? And so, when we have a home seller that needs to get their property on the market quickly, we have our different hacks and tricks and strategies and tactics that we use to help our home sellers get their property staged and sold quickly for the most amount of money. We specialize in occupied listings, so that's one area that makes us unique. A lot of home staging companies, they like to do the vacant properties, right? So they'll bring in all their inventory and then they will stage the home with all the goods rented on a monthly basis. But we know that the market has more occupied listings for sale than they do vacant. So that is a niche that we specialize in. And what we call that is redesign home staging. And we have so many excellent reviews on our Google that has really helped to transition our business into even more and exciting projects, which leads me into the next differentiator and that is our yacht staging business. Very unique, very niche. And we actually stage yachts for three of the largest home shows, boat shows, I should say sorry, boat shows here in South Florida, which is the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, which is coming up in October. We have the Miami Boat Show in February, and then in March we have the West Palm Beach Show. So, we help our yacht brokers stage their beautiful yachts that come in kind of plain Jane and need a little jolt and we prepare them for these big boat shows. And then we also work with resale yacht owners, private owners that need to amp up the look and feel of the yacht before it is sold for resale. Then we also have our staging for healthcare industry. And we stage assisted living facilities, memory care facilities, and we stage the model units to help market those facilities in selling to potential clients that would need that type of healthcare needs.

What do you love most about what you do

What do you love most about the work you do at Captiva Design? Gosh, that's a hard question because I love everything about what I do. I can tell you a few things, and I can tell you right off the bat what I don't enjoy doing because I'm getting older is schlepping furniture and containers of inventory back and forth, up and down. It is very labor intensive, and a lot of people don't know that about the staging process, the behind the scenes that there's a lot of physical labor involved in setting up and tearing down. So as age, right? Because I've been doing this for over 18 years, it's affecting the body now. So I've had to bring in some help for that part of it. But the good thing is you get a great workout, and you will definitely get 10,000 steps in for the day. So that's a good thing, right? We always got to find positive. But the thing I love most about what I do is the transformation, particularly in staging. Because unlike design, projects can take time, right? It can take months, sometimes even years. But staging, you have to get that home ready ASAP, right when the agent calls you and they say, hey, Bridget, I have a listing that I need to get out there in a week or two, we've got to move quickly to get that house up to Snuff, where it is presentable to the general market. So I love the transformation. I love when clients say, oh my gosh, I never knew my home could look like that. Why did I think of that earlier? We've even had people say, after we do the staging, they're like, you know what? I don't even want to sell this house. I absolutely love it. So, I love those types of reactions, and I love people. I love working with people. And what's beautiful about redesign is that, like I said, no two homes are alike, right? Every home is different. Every home is unique. Even if you go into a gated community, a planned community, where you have maybe five or six actual design layouts within that community, you can still make that home unique and different. Even though the neighbor two houses down have the same layout and floor plan. I like bringing the individuality to each home and curating it essentially for the client’s needs.

What is most challenging about what you do

What do you find most challenging about the work you do? So, in redesign, the challenge is try working with people's furniture and artwork and accessories and moving that around in what I call home edits, right? Because in real estate, you are selling your space, not your things, and clutter eats equity. So I would say the biggest challenge in doing redesign is clutter and telling people they either need to pack it, sell it, or donate it.

How has working with KABMS benefitted Captiva Design

How has working with Kitchen & Bath Marketing Solutions benefitted your company? Yeah. So a great relationship here has been established with your team, I should say, because I know it's a team effort in helping me just broaden my reach. So I already had some things in play between my website, my social media, and my Google My Business page, but I needed help in to kind of, like, tighten up some things on the back end, which I'm not good at, are capable of handling. Neither do I choose to want to handle that part. And I love this energy that we have in that you first have a consultation where we can talk about my business, what I need, what I want to see, how I want to grow. And then that translates into, now, how can Jason and the team put together a program that works for me on the back end and financially? Because you got to pay to play, right? So in order to make more money, you have to spend money to market yourself to your avatar client and get that reach out there. So I love the way that you guys have helped in getting my Google My Business up and running to where it's attracting clients. Can I tell you, I just got a call yesterday from Google. She said she found me and she wants to do an interior decorating project. She just bought a house and she just needs help kind of putting things together. And I booked her for tomorrow. Yay. So that's just a recent one in the last 24 hours. So it works if you work it. And I'm all about working with a community of people that can help me do the things that I can't do or I don't want to do so that I can focus on what I'm good at, and that's doing staging design work and sales. So I'm excited about what's to come. But even in a short time, because we haven't even been working together six months and I've already seen results, and it's not just me saying, that all, I got a phone call and I booked an appointment, but it's also seeing the reports that show that more people are finding me, more people are clicking on my website. Obviously more people are calling me, and it's happening at a higher frequency in a short amount of time. So that's good. So maybe if I just left it as is yeah, I could kind of do my own thing, but maybe I get one call every three months versus getting one call every week. So that's a huge difference. Super excited, super happy with the service, and so glad that you have a team of people that can take that off my plate. So thank you.

Any advice for your younger self

What advice would you give new business owners looking to grow or what advice would you have given your younger self just starting out? Yes. Great question. And I do train and mentor other new stagers and decorators redesigners. And I'm telling you, if I had to do it again, I would hire the help right out the gate for setting up systems and putting things into place. Like most people, when you're just starting a business, the funds might not be there to hire all the people that you need to get the ball rolling. So a lot of it was trial and error, making mistakes, spending money and not getting results and trying to do it on your own and then you're exhausted. There's nothing left at the end of the day to give to your family, your loved ones. And that's important to me. So I would say to my younger self and to anyone just starting out is take the time to assess what you need, find the right people that can help you. Maybe you can't do everything at one time, but figure out what's important. And any new business owner, look, you got to get into the game of social media. I know some of the more mature business owners are a little scared of the Internet, and it's just a lot to do. And if you don't feel like you can do it yourself, hire somebody who is skilled to do it, somebody that you can trust and look at the track record of that person that is going to be working with you. And really important for me because I am a customer service driven person. I need to talk to somebody. Like, I'm not a robot and I don't want to be serviced by a robot. I want to pick up the phone and be able to talk to a live human being and that really does make a difference. So I'm really appreciative that I have somebody that I can call and that can help me. So thank you. Lastly, I guess I would just say that it's important to have a good communication system between the client and the people that are being served, that are serving the client. Because communication is everything. And what I like to say is I'm a slow crawl. I don't just jump into anything. I need to let that sit with me and kind of think about it and process it because it is a business and anything that I'm going to invest in, I do want to see my return on investment. So I'm grateful that you guys were able to provide really detailed information about the services that you can provide. Some of them I was obviously able to use. Others in the future, I'm planning as I grow and expand, to use that as well. So I like the fact that you can take your time and grow and evolve and develop as your business grows and like having that option available to me. And I like having your team with their expertise on the back end of things that I don't know. So very grateful for that.