Laid Off From Tech, She Built a $168,000 Interior Design Studio

Abigail Morris expects her interior design studio to bring in about $168,000 this year — roughly three and a half times the $48,000 she took home in her first twelve months of business. Her Chicago-based firm, Abigail Morris Interiors, reached that trajectory only after a layoff at the end of 2024 pushed her out of corporate tech and into full-time design work.

The backstory is a familiar one for practitioners weighing a side hustle. Morris spent about ten years in corporate tech after her family steered her toward what she calls a "safe" business-school career path. During the pandemic, she reevaluated. "It felt like a now or never moment," she said.

She took interior design classes at The Art Institute of Chicago, earned a certificate, and launched an interior design Instagram account to signal she was open for business. But she kept the day job. "I was still a little afraid to go all-in. I had a very comfortable job; I had the golden handcuffs," she said.

How a layoff changed the business model

The layoff at the end of 2024 did what she hadn't managed herself. "It was such a blessing in disguise — the universe setting me free to go all-in on my business," Morris said. Around the same time, she narrowed her focus to restoring historic residential and commercial properties.

The niche found her as much as she found it. Morris and her husband live in an 1889 row home in Chicago. Before the layoff, she updated the house, had it professionally photographed, and added the project to her Instagram portfolio. "The first few clients that reached out to me had also had historic homes and were attracted to me because I had that in my portfolio. The business snowballed from there," she said.

Demand now extends well beyond Chicago. She fields requests from across the Midwest and even the West Coast. In recent months, she's also seen a new category: owners of newer builds who want the feel of a character-rich historic home.

The flagship project this year was the St. Elmo Hotel in Ouray, Colorado. The owner, part of a hospitality group that had already completed a project in Montrose, Colorado, wanted a designer for a building with many original features — celebrating them while adding modern comforts. Morris got the call because she'd already worked on a hotel listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

What does historic-property design actually change?

For practitioners, the workflow inverts. Most redesigns start from scratch and reimagine everything. Historic work doesn't. "We have to think about what we can preserve," Morris said. At the St. Elmo, her team kept as much original wallpaper as possible, removed no wainscoting, and repaired features back to their original condition. Her advice: "It's about having an eye for editing before making any big design decisions."

The financials tell a clear scaling story. First-year take-home pay was about $48,000, earned while still working full-time — "trial by fire," in her words. This year's revenue is on track for $168,000, with take-home pay of roughly $100,000, or about $8,300 a month. The remaining roughly $68,000 gets reinvested: PR, project photography, a stylist, a videographer, and now an editor for social media reels, which she calls "a full time job in and of itself."

Hiring, AI clients, and a crafts revival

Next comes headcount. Morris has a CPA, a bookkeeper, and had a summer intern, but she says she's "wearing too many hats" to scale design work and client experience the way she wants. She's actively interviewing candidates this week for procurement, technical drawings, and assistant tasks.

AI cuts both ways for her studio. She uses Claude and ChatGPT for back-office tasks, like organizing iPad notes from job sites. But clients increasingly arrive with AI-generated designs. "Just because AI generates this picture, that doesn't mean it's structurally possible to implement. Or maybe it includes a specific chair that doesn't exist," she said.

Her bigger thesis: AI's rise will fuel demand for craftsmanship. "I think we're going to have an arts and crafts renaissance," Morris said, drawing a parallel to the original American Arts and Crafts revival that answered the Industrial Revolution's mass production. "People gravitate toward items that look like somebody actually made them with their hands versus in a machine across the ocean."

For a solo founder, the bet is that the hunger for "layered, cozy" homes becomes a durable market — one where an Instagram portfolio, a layoff, and a 19th-century row house added up to a business doubling its take-home pay in a single year.