Meet Ashley Wells Design: Warm & Approachable Interior Design for Real Life
Ashley is an interior designer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She approached me in a transition period between contracting from a friend’s design business and starting her own. Ashley began receiving repeat clients, new clients, and contractors interested in her interior design services. Realizing how quickly her business started to grow, she decided a solid brand identity, website, and social media presence was vital to maintain her momentum. For her brand nurture week, I focused on establishing a strategy behind the design, crafting brand visuals that feel sophisticated, yet approachable, and providing custom design tools to elevate her client experience. This intentional approach set the stage perfectly for the branding for interior designer Ashley Wells Design, helping her confidently step into her new business chapter.
How Strategy Sets the Foundation for Ashley’s Interior Design Brand Identity
For any brand project, is it important to establish a strategy to build your brand visuals on. Ashley’s core values established during this process include: relatable sophistication, honest collaboration, creativity with purpose, and adaptable design. Ashley is known for approachable, elevated interior design that help people feel more at home in their space – with rooms that reflect their lifestyle, support their daily routines, and feel effortlessly pulled together.
As a mom herself, Ashley understands the reality of parenthood and building a home to be proud of and that feels authentic. She coined the phrase ‘messy pretty’ referring to describe this balance. Often when she’s designing for families, she incorporates furniture or baskets to help conceal the mess of a lived-in home.
Throughout the design process, I keep these values, personality, and ideal client top of mind to establish visuals that connect on a deeper level. This is how you grow a business clients and customers believe in—by building a brand rooted in what matters to the people you’re serving. This kind of intentional approach is what makes branding for interior designers so impactful.
Behind the Design: Creating a Refined Yet Approachable Branding for Interior Designer
Color Palette
Ashley’s color palette combines warm neutrals, soft greens, and a deep charcoal for contrast. The tones feel calm, layered, and approachable — striking a balance between refined and relaxed. It reflects a brand that’s thoughtful, effortlessly livable, and rooted in lasting style. Her audience will interpret this as elegant, welcoming, and elevated — with just enough edge to stand out.
Logo suite
The main logo is a soft, organic serif that feels refined yet approachable. I customized the primary logo type by making the serifs a bit smaller and more subtle. Additionally, I raised the cross point of the A to align with the horizontal components of the other letterforms of the E and H. This not only adds another layer of individuality, but also fits better with the brand strategy. I incorporated clean sans serif for taglines and paired messaging. Additionally, I incorporated a handcrafted script font for accents. This approach will position her brand as trustworthy, creative, sophisticated, and relatable.
custom gardenia illustration
Another important aspect of this brand is the custom gardenia illustration. In the brand questionnaire, Ashley mentioned they have several gardenias on their property. This serves to be symbolic of their home in North Carolina, where her passion for interiors took off. To add a more home interior style, I incorporated a version that includes a frame around the illustration. The custom monogram brings sophistication and timelessness to the brand, and adds cohesiveness to the logotype.
Custom patterns
To add depth to Ashley’s brand identity, I created a collection of custom striped patterns and marbled textures. These assets are reinforce her brand identity by offering a hand-crafted feeling. Blending warm neutrals with muted sage greens, these patterns complement her sophisticated yet approachable aesthetic. The organic movement of the marbled textures adds softness and visual depth, while the striped patterns offer a more structured, sophisticated touch. Applied across her website, social media, and marketing materials; these custom elements enhance brand recognition, adding an extra layer of warmth and intentionality that tells Ashley’s story and deeply resonates with her ideal clients.
A Beautiful Starting Point: Ashley Wells Design’s Coming Soon Website
To help Ashley begin to establish her online presence and legitimize her new interior design business, I created a custom, strategically designed coming soon website. This site currently serves three core purposes: introduce Ashley’s new brand identity, provide a polished portfolio to showcase her recent design projects, and offer an easy, professional way for potential clients to get in touch.
This site lays the groundwork for future growth online. The initial set up of her site includes a beautifully designed coming soon page showcasing her new brand and informing her audience about what’s coming. There are two call to action buttons on this page directing visitors to view her portfolio or contact her. On the portfolio page, are three featured projects to give a glimpse into Ashley’s design capabilities. Integrated on the contact page is a Honeybook contact form to allow potential clients to get in touch while allowing Ashley to stay organized.
Over the coming months, I will help Ashley expand her website more extensively. But this intentional starting point provides her immediate credibility, maintains momentum with new leads, and continues to position her for growth and success. This offers a reminder that you don’t have to do everything all at once. Take it at your own pace in a way that feels natural for you and your business.
Enhancing Ashley’s Client Experience with Custom Design Tools
To support Ashley in delivering a seamless and professional experience for her clients, I created a set of thoughtfully customized tools tailored to her workflow. These include templates for Honeybook, Canva, Google Sheets, and an email signature template.
I started by setting up her brand in her Honeybook account and created an invoice template. On top of that, I set up a contact form in her Honeybook template and integrated it onto her Showit website. Next, I set up her Canva brand kit with all of her new brand assets including logos, fonts, colors, patterns, and icons. Once that was set up, I created a beautiful, easy-to-use design concept board presentation deck to help her confidently present ideas to clients.
To simplify project communication and enhance professionalism, I built a custom Google Sheets template. Ashley can use this to share design selections and details with clients in a clean and organized way. And to ensure her brand presence carries through to every interaction, I designed a professional, on-brand email signature template she can use when communicating with clients. If you plan to have more than one link in your email signature, I recommend using Google Docs. Using Canva to design your email signature can be great, but you have to export as an image. Google Docs allows you to still add your branding and link to multiple places.
Together, these tools help Ashley deliver a more thoughtful, consistent client experience while giving her time back to focus on the work she’s most passionate about.
The benefit of Brand Nurture Week – tailored to each business
Ashley’s project is a beautiful example of how strategy-driven design can support a business from the inside out. Through handcrafted visuals, integrated and strategic systems, and custom tools, she now has a cohesive foundation to confidently grow her interior design business.
This project came together through my Brand Nurture Week, a service designed to provide impactful branding for interior designers and other creative entrepreneurs in a focused, one-week format. Each week is tailored to meet the specific needs of the business—whether that’s a refined visual identity, foundational client experience tools, or both. No two businesses are the same, which is why every Brand Nurture Week is completely customized to your goals, timeline, and priorities.
If you’re ready to step into your next season with a brand that feels like home—and helps you run your business more smoothly—I’d love to support you.
