Rekindling Creativity – Through Design

From Baltimore Business Journal, Enterprising Women 2014, Learn To Lead – By Brittany Cheng

After 15 years in senior design and management roles at global architectural firms such as HOK and Gensler, interior designer Kelly Ennis dropped everything in 2009 to start an interior design business out of her own basement.

In the beginning, her company, Verve Partnership LLC, had just two or three clients. Ennis had four design employees, and they worked remotely or out of her kitchen for the first four years.

Now nearing its fifth anniversary in September, Verve has moved out of the kitchen. The firm moved in July from its first office space, on Keswick Road in Hampden, into a larger office space on Union Avenue.

Verve ranks among the top 20 fastest-growing woman-owned businesses in Greater Baltimore, having grown its revenue by more than 28 percent in 2013. Clients include Under Armour, a “large utility company,” several law firms and a few startup companies, Ennis said. She’s now eyeing higher education as a means to round out her client base, and she hopes to be designing buildings in 10 years.

And while Ennis recently added another designer to the team – bringing Verve’s employee count to 12 – she plans to cap her staff at about 20 people. The relatively small number starkly contrasts with the more than 4,200-person staff of one of Ennis’ former employers, Gensler.

“We want it to be manageable, and we want it to be meaningful…It’s hard to have meaningful conversations with an office of 100 people,” Ennis said.

The desire for a close-knit work environment was in part what spurred Ennis’ departure from high-profile design firms. She switched from working at global to national to regional firms and still felt stifled.

“The economy was tanking. Inspiration was just being sucked dry out of everybody,” she said. “We spend more than half our life at work. Everybody does. To have the inspiration sucked dry, I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

For someone who had been interested in architecture since childhood, the passionless atmosphere wouldn’t do.

“I knew what I wanted to do from the time I was 8 years old, and I say it with the love and passion that comes behind design and architecture …. I got my first set of Lincoln Logs when I was 8 years old and never looked back,” Ennis said.

So for Verve’s new office space near Clipper Mill, she ensured the workplace design lends to inspiration and creativity. The space at Verve is filled with natural light and is designed to be open, inviting conversation and establishing a friendly ambiance.

“The research says, ‘Here’s your environment, and how you respond can only make you that more productive or that more engaged or that more creative or that much more profitable,'” Ennis said.

A design conducive to creativity flows into better work and better revenue, Ennis said.

“If you have more engagement and happy employees, you’re always going to be profitable,” she said.