Counting Down Our Most Listened-To Episodes of 2025: Jamie Young

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The DesignDash Podcast was created for designers who care about the work and the life they build around it. Each episode is a long-form conversation with someone building a design career in real time, often while juggling family, financial pressure, growth decisions, and the day-to-day realities of running a firm. None of these are surface-level interviews. They’re discussions about how firm owners actually got started, what surprised them along the way, to what (and whom) they attribute their success, and what they would do differently if they had to do it again.

This series highlights our most listened-to episodes of 2025. These episodes struck a chord with firm owners and freelancers who are making decisions about projects, partnerships, expansion, and visibility. In the articles that follow, we look closely at what made each conversation resonate and what practical lessons can be pulled from designers who are actively shaping their businesses, not reflecting on them from a distance.

Episode 60: What It Really Takes to Build a Timeless Design Brand with Jamie Young

Jamie Young started her company almost three decades ago and she still talks about the early days with a mix of pride and disbelief. She was pregnant with her first son when she and her husband decided to go for it, even with plenty of people questioning the timing. Jamie describes the company as being built on grit and hustle, but also on something more specific: she genuinely loves business.

She likes selling a product, building a customer base, and living the kind of creative life that includes travel and big ideas. That combination explains why the brand has had so much staying power in our industry. She was building a machine that could support the work in addition to pursuing her aesthetic.

Urgency, improvisation, and learning in public led the early years

Her stories from the beginning are vivid in the way only real stories are. She remembers breastfeeding her newborn while faxing orders to a small village in Mexico because there was no internet and everything felt urgent.

Looking back, she wishes she had slowed down and taken a breath, and she laughs at how intense she was, but she doesn’t dismiss the urgency either. It got the business off the ground. Later in the episode, she talks about the point where “bootstrapped” stopped being sustainable. Around 11 or 12 years ago, the cost of holding inventory and running the company hit a ceiling she couldn’t solve with willpower.

So she found a business partner who understood banking relationships and operations. That decision freed her to focus on sales, marketing, and design, and she’s honest that she didn’t even realize business partners were part of how many brands scale. She assumed everyone else just had more money.

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Reinvention came after the surge (and the crash)

Jamie is direct about the emotional side of growth, especially post-COVID. The company stayed open and had one of its best years because people were stuck at home buying furnishings, but it created a strange whiplash.

Once demand returned to normal, she felt exhausted and had to reorient around a new baseline. Add in travel restrictions during COVID, slow development cycles, and skyrocketing shipping costs, and you get a clearer picture of why burnout hit. What’s impressive is how she describes getting out of it: not with a grand reset, but by choosing the next push. More furniture, more mirrors, more accessories, more categories, more development travel, and stronger team support.

She’s careful about brand identity while expanding, and she repeats a question her team asks constantly: “Is this Jamie Young?” For firm owners, that’s a useful filter. You can serve different looks, different clients, different markets, but you still need a thread. She calls it mixed materials, hand touch, glazes, natural elements, and casual elegance that actually fits real life.

Takeaways for firm owners and freelancers

• Start with what you can execute, not what you can perfect. Jamie didn’t wait for ideal infrastructure. She built early momentum with scrappy tools, urgency, and a willingness to learn business while doing it.
• Learn when you’ve hit your ceiling. She recognized the moment when inventory, cash flow, and operational complexity required help, then brought in a partner who understood scale and banking.
• Treat inventory and speed as a strategy, not a convenience. Jamie frames fast shipping and reliable stock as a customer service decision, and she’s clear that it takes serious capital to do it well.
• Keep asking the brand question. Her team regularly checks new designs against “Is this Jamie Young?” That single question prevents random expansion and keeps product development aligned.
• Expect reinvention every few years. She describes getting copied, watching competitors catch up, and choosing to create the next idea rather than spending energy policing the old one.
• Use constraints as a creative forcing function. Travel limits, container costs, and global disruptions didn’t stop the work, but they did require constant recalibration instead of panic decisions.
• Build trust by letting people do their jobs. Jamie credits long-tenured team members and talks openly about learning to let go while still staying engaged.
• Burnout after a surge year is common and it changes decision-making. She describes the post-COVID crash as exhaustion plus confusion about what “normal” even looked like, then rebuilding energy through new direction and product focus.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. Her 2008 story about negotiating rent is a good reminder that direct conversations can buy time and keep the business alive.

Explore Other Episodes That Made Our “Most Listened-To” List!

Written by the DesignDash Editorial Team
Our contributors include experienced designers, firm owners, design writers, and other industry professionals. If you’re interested in submitting your work or collaborating, please reach out to our Editor-in-Chief at editor@designdash.com.