There are an increasing number of ways that interior designers can generate additional revenue on top of their traditional business models. One of those is affiliate marketing is one of these methods that allows businesses not only to grow their brand and increase exposure to a wider audience, but to also make passive income. 

In this article, we will dive deeper into what affiliate marketing can do for your interior design business and what we can expect from affiliate marketing programs in the future. We will also talk about the 1stDibs designer affiliate program, the first luxury interior products company with an affiliate marketing program that also offers sleek interfacing and a variety of visual options to integrate your company’s mark. Let’s dive in. 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting the goods or services of others on your website or social media platforms, and making a small commission for doing so. That commission is usually awarded once someone buys a product after finding it through your promotion. It is a very popular marketing strategy on social media, but is also a key way that reviews and product-recommendation websites monetize their editorial content. 

There are three key benefits to affiliate marketing

1. Making a highly visible connection to another company, which you can promote through your own social media and can negotiate to cross promote with the external brand, you are widening your audience. You can also use hashtags in your promotional posts to cast your potential client net even wider. 
2. You will make passive income: every time someone buys a product using your affiliate link, you will make a portion of the profit from that sale. Note that each affiliate program has a different payout structure, so do your research before signing up to be a partner to any external brand.
3. If used carefully, affiliate marketing can elevate your brand. However, because affiliate marketing is so new in the interior design space, there are limited opportunities to partner with luxury product companies. More on that below. 

Affiliate Marketing for Interior Designers: The Good and the Bad

The benefits of affiliate marketing for interior designers are the opportunity to align yourself with like-minded brands and producers. And, of course, the opportunity to make additional income. Those two benefits are nothing to sneeze at. 

The downsides are largely related to the fact that this is still a pretty new territory for the interior design industry

• Depending on the type of interior design you do, it can be difficult to find existing affiliate programs that suit your brand due to the limited number of luxury retailers that have entered the space. According to 3Hundred, a marketing company focused exclusively on content monetization strategies, some of the most lucrative product companies interior designers can work with as an affiliate marketer include, with their profit sharing amount: 

• CanvasVows - 25% 
• One Kings Lane - 20% 
• Joybird - 15% 
• Great Furniture Deal - 13%
• Neiman Marcus - 10%

• Another thing to watch out for is that each affiliate program comes with its own set of user terms, payouts to participating designers, and parameters designers must work within, and you may or may not find those terms agreeable.
• You may find a brand you align with in spirit, but not in branding and marketing approach, and find that partnering with them given that disconnect cheapens the look of your social media when adding the product company’s logo and link to your pages. These are important considerations, because protecting your brand should be your number one priority. 

Introducing the 1stDibs Affiliate Marketing Program

For luxury interior designers interested in affiliate marketing, 1stDibs is offering the first program of its kind for luxury goods. In fact, if you search the “affiliate marketing” on Architectural Digest, the 1stDibs program is the only search result you will find. What does 1stDibs offer it’s partners? It’s split is actually quite generous: 

• 20% commission
• $300 commission cap for new buyers
• $70 commission cap for repeat buyers. 

Plus, 1stDibs also has seamless integrations with all of the most pertinent digital marketing tools and social media platforms, such as:

• Email Newsletters
• Blog Posts
• Instagram (Grid or Swipe up from Stories)
• Captions of Youtube Videos
• Linktree within your Instagram Bios
• Pinterest

If users tag @1stdibs in their posts, 1stDibs will share to their social media, widening your audience to a coveted audience of high end shoppers. Signing up and using the internal interface is easy and allows users to create sleep integrations (see lead image). For interior designers looking to get started with high end affiliate marketing, signing up for the 1stDibs programs is a no brainer. 

The future of affiliate marketing looks promising, and interior designers will increasingly get to forge relationships with the vendors they like to work with and negotiate deals that make sense for both the design and the vendor businesses. And with the 1stDibs affiliate program, now there is a model that other high-end vendors can tweak to meet their individual needs while making their interior designer clients happy with sleek, professional integrations. 

Interior designers working today will be pioneers in the space of luxury affiliate marketing, which is exciting and something Design Manager will be following in this space.