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Miaja Design Group is an interior design company that works with hotels in creating a great living environment for their guests, with high quality furniture, furnishings, and fittings.

“Interior design is very personal, so you can always set out to do something different, just like an artist” says Isabelle Miaja, founder of the Miaja Design Group.  But we also wanted to go after niche markets, deliver something very exclusive to properties, that are not a generic design.

Like most businesses, Isabelle had to start small, and with residential interior design. But then they had a break when they were asked to retrofit the M Hotel in Singapore, and from here were able expand into the hotel business across Asia.

Isabelle comments: “In the design world, you have a signature, as you develop, you deepen that signature, and it becomes recognizable as a brand.  Its like the fashion industry.”

But you still need the entrepreneurial spirit to go out on your own, says Isabelle. My father was an entrepreneur in Paris, so I have seen independence, but I saw the difficulties with the long hours he put into his business. However, I saw how proud he was to sit in his own office. Being in the jewellery business, he was also a creator in his own right.

When I set up in business 24 years ago, there were very few interior designers in Singapore. I had previously worked in the US, and the main challenge when starting out was to understand the mentality – how to work with Singaporeans! But they liked the fact that I was French, I was young, and I could show a portfolio with fresh ideas.

Despite my signature, in order to take the business to the next level I needed to find a different way of approaching clients. Today, only about 20% of the time do clients specifically want our personal signature, and for 80% we need to ‘run for it’. PR is essential to sell the brand and to stay on top of the brand.

PR is kept in-house as the PR people need know the company inside out, particularly as we are going into new sectors. The pollination on the communications needs to be instinctive, there will be cross-overs to other categories, for example we intend to extend our brand into our own line of furniture.

We need to find ways to constantly diffuse our brand, we recently started a quarterly magazine to showcase our work. Because art is such an important part of my design signature, we also opened an art gallery business and we now have two contemporary art galleries in central Singapore.

Today we do business across the Asia Pacific region. I attend hotel investment conferences, I get to meet potential clients, and it also gives insight into the sector. These conferences give facts and figures on the hotel business, e.g. growth, how many hotels are being built, what are the issues on hotel development, etc. These conferences do the market research – they guide me each year on where I need to do my PR and business development.

As a business and leisure traveller I get to stay in hotels all the time. This gives me insight into what the competition are doing, best practice, what materials are being used, and the brands used, etc. For example, Swissotel have opened their wellness rooms to including aromatherapy, the desk can be raised high for standing, and there is a wall gym in the suite.

But other categories can learn from signature branding too.  Manufacturers’ core competencies are in engineering and production, and not necessarily in design.  This is why partnerships between designers and manufacturers help to build great brands. Perhaps the best example is Pininfarina and Ferrari.

But this can extend to any consumer product category where ‘looking good’ helps sell products.

Article written by Piers Lee, Managing Director of Novema Pte Ltd. Contact: info@novema-research.com