To-The-Trade S3E23 Stop Posting the Final Photo. Shannon Ggem on What Actually Pulls Clients In.

You get maybe twenty good photos of a finished install in a year. There are 365 days in the year. What fills the rest? Most designers cycle the same images or go quiet, while the thing clients actually want to see- the process and the reasoning and the real cost- never leaves the designer's head.Shannon Ggem hit that wall for ten years. She posted three times a week and earned roughly one new follower every three months, most of them people she met face to face at trade shows. Then she agreed to be the private case study for a new content system from Laurie Laizure at Interior Design Community. This To-The-Trade conversation is the thirty-day debrief.The first fix was not strategic. Laurie told Shannon to drop the filters, and the numbers moved immediately. In a feed increasingly full of AI-generated talking heads, looking like an actual person is now an advantage.The second fix was scripting, which Shannon resisted hard. Being told to be authentic and then handed a script feels contradictory. The comparison changed her mind: scripted videos are cleaner, shorter, and free of her natural repetition. The workflow is practical. Build the script from your own talking points, edit it in Notes until it sounds like you, paste it into the teleprompter in Edits, record one paragraph at a time, delete bad takes as you go, and curate your photos before you open the app.Shannon's most useful admission is about the times she reverted to her old habits. Those posts took longer and performed worse. Her top two videos in the whole feed were made with no makeup, in pajamas, in about ten minutes.The back half widens out. Laurie tracks what featuring a brand does for that brand, which is fifty new followers at minimum and sometimes 250, and makes the case for naming makers out loud so handcrafted work becomes desirable instead of anonymous. Shannon talks about posting on drawings, a topic she assumed nobody wanted, and finding that clients rebuilding after the fires very much did. Both push toward publishing real timelines and cost ranges alongside the satisfying before and after reels.There is also a good stretch on emotional resistance, which for Shannon disguised itself as a file management problem and nearly killed a post about her first career as a scream queen. That post was a hit.The month ended at 158,800 views and 990 new followers, plus a licensing conversation, a referral, and two paid brand collaborations. IDC is opening the process up to the full community.