Welcome to the New Earnest Home co.

Well, well, well!  Something might look a tad different around here to you today and for good reason!  We’ve just completed an almost year-long re-brand and re-org journey on this site.  In a few minutes, I’ll jump into showing you around what’s different, but for now, a little background…

Last year, I underwent a major change and took a big leap (by business standards) to re-brand my entire company.  It was a huge risk for me to change the names of two companies that were already established, but it was totally necessary for my sanity.  You see, I started with the blog, House of Earnest, which was a lot like this blog still is today.  We did DIYs, home decor projects, talked a little nonsense about life, and I strived to provide design-minded traditionalists (like myself) with ideas that were fresh and current, while remaining true to our classic roots.  I also designed a line of home decor good that I sold to boutiques around the country and directly to customers online under the name Grandiflora.  One day, I just realized it was too much.  I was running two companies, but totally separately.  There was so much overlap in style and esthetic, yet I was keeping my shop that I designed for and my blog that I ran totally separate.  In a lot of cases it was causing double the work, but worse than that, it was confusing for customers and readers who were like, “wait?  Are you a shop designer? or are you a blogger?”  “What is this other brand?”

My goal last January when rebranding BOTH businesses under the name ‘Earnest Home’ was to bring those two facets of my life (blog and my shop) closer together, and run them as one design company – half inspiration, half shop. BUT I didn’t want to completely overwhelm you guys with the combination of these two things, so I took ONE step last year to complete the rebrand both the blog and the shop, and to integrate the shop more closely into the blog, but due to shop logistics, they still remained on separate websites.  I let that dust settle for about a year before embarking upon what I called phase II of the rebrand which is to have both the blog and the shop and the entire Earnest Home co. company in one website.  I wanted it to be clear that I am a product designer and I provide home inspiration and those two things can (and should) live together.

So, without further ado, WELCOME!  There are some big changes and I’m going to walk you though them now.

THE BLOG

The blog posts are all still here!  On the front page, you can find the latest post right under the main slideshow.  They’re shown in this little tile format and you an just click right on the one you want to read and it will take you through to the full post.

OR, you can explore posts by looking at one of four popular categories – Home Decor, DIY, Entertaining, and Travel.

When you click on these little buttons (which are located at the bottom of each page), you will be taken to a page that looks like this:

But guess what?  You won’t only be shown just the POSTS related to that category, you’ll also be shown my designs in the shop which are also tied to that category! Like this:

So, you get all entertaining in one spot!

or, if you’re a traditionalist at heart (aren’t we all?!)  You can click on ‘BLOG’ in the menu bar and be taken to all posts in a grid-like format to make for easy navigating.

The Shop

If you’re here to shop my designs, that is much easier as well.  You can shop right off the homepage by just scrolling down and clicking on the tab you want to shop.

Or, similar to the blog, you can still click on ‘Shop’ in the menu and be taken to the entire shop where you can filter by price or category or search for a particular product as well.

And just because I’m easily entertained, I though the integration was so fabulous, that I got a little fancy and even put a shopping cart dropdown from the header so that you don’t have jump back and forth, you can shop, you can read articles, you can do whatever you’d like without leaving your cart.

You’ll notice that there is a TON to see and checkout.  I know you’ll get a hang of it quickly and appreciate how easily accessible all the posts and product are!

Whew… are you still here?  I sure hope so!  This site is special to me for another reason too…. Because I completely built the entire thing. I used my original branding package that I worked with the Wonder Jam on last year, so the logos, colors, and overall esthetic are fairly similar, but the whole site layout, coding, and development were a total in-house job.  I only had to call on Matt’s programming skills for one font formatting issue.  I was actually really proud of myself for keeping it together during the transition even through there was a time on Friday night (when I accidentally sent dummy blog content) out to everyone on my mailing list (sorry about that, guys).  There was also a time yesterday when I didn’t think I would finish and I kind of had a ‘moment’ in my office where I was just staring into space.

All of the hard work was TOTALLY worth it, however.  I’m SO excited with how it all came together and cannot WAIT to get your feedback!

DON’T LEAVE YET, THOUGH!  In celebration of the new look, we’re offering 20% off the entire shop with the promo code NEWLOOK – so go and enjoy yourself a little sale and snoop around!