Finding, sharing beautiful things
Design Milk boosts new talent
When Jaime Derringer launched her blog, Design Milk, in 2006 she had no idea it would turn into a site with more than four million social media followers, attracting around a million visitors every month.
“I certainly wasn’t setting out to start a design magazine, so to speak, but I guess there was something about the things I was finding and sharing that people really loved and it resonated with them,” she says. “There wasn’t really too many voices on the Internet at that time that were talking casually about design and from a layperson perspective, because that’s what I bring. I bring the customers’ perspective to design.”
Derringer’s love of finding and sharing beautiful things, from architecture to art to fashion and products, hasn’t waned, with her readership growing by around 15 to 20 per cent every year and her site expanding to include Dog Milk (for the dog lovers) and Adorn Milk which sells architectural jewelry.
“Eighty per cent of what we (feature) now comes to us,” says Derringer, based in California.
“From readers that are designers and architects and connections we’ve made over the years with marketing firms. I’d say about 20 per cent comes from us finding things and a lot of times we’re finding them at trade shows or via clicking on something on Pinterest and clicking on something else and going down a path that was unexpected.”
Shining a light on new and emerging designers makes her happy. “When I see a grad student or young designer and I write about them — and I don’t know that this is directly related to my site or not — but then I see them the following year and they’ve got better and bigger stuff and then it keeps going and going. I love to see that.”
Billy Carpenter, principal at Vin de Garde, which builds modern wine cellar, says when Derringer wrote about his Vancouver firm on Design Milk, response was swift. “There was a huge spike in visitors directly from her link to our blog. We tracked how it went and we saw thousands of visitors come in less than a couple of hours.”