Episode
To-The-Trade S2E57 Budgets, Boundaries and Beautiful Shoots with Romina Tina Fontana
- Published
- Dec 15, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2741
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Summary
In this To-The-Trade podcast episode, host Laurie Laizure interviews Montreal-based interior designer Romina Tina Fontana of Fontana & Company about how her background in marketing and graphic design influences her approach to running her studio. After nearly twenty years in advertising, working with major agencies and brands, Romina shifted into interior design by photographing her own home and friends’ houses. A behind-the-scenes Instagram story caught the attention of HGTV editors, who featured her Victorian “bachelorette pad,” helping to launch her interior design career. Romina discusses how she treats her business like a brand, using a consistent palette of yellows and greens and a custom illustration in her logo. She depends on a detailed ten-phase process document that reflects her services agreement. Whenever she has allowed a client to pressure her into skipping or changing a phase, problems have resulted, so she now safeguards that structure and improves it after each project. She has even added a specification phase to emphasize the technical details involved in choosing fixtures and fittings. A significant theme is photography as a strategic business tool. Drawing on her advertising experience, Romina budgets for professional images on nearly every project, sometimes waiting for the right season to show a home at its best. She collaborates with trusted photographers and editorial stylists, like Me and Mo in Toronto, to create vertical vignettes that work for magazines. One Rosedale project styled and shot this way was later published, clearly showing a return on her marketing investment. Her advice to designers is to set aside photo funds from the start and invest in experienced stylists, especially early in their careers. The conversation also covers…