Karin Bohn is an award-winning designer and the CEO of House of Bohn based in Vancouver, Canada.
The design empress has worked hard to create her own interior design agency which is one of Vancouver’s most sought-after design agencies. Her YouTube channel has gained over 52,000 subscribers where she documents her daily life as a female entrepreneur and offers tips and advice to entrepreneurs alike.
Karin grew up in a small town in Dawson Creek, British Columbia where she didn’t have a set goal on becoming an interior designer but had a spirit for entrepreneurship having sold chocolate bars to her classmates at school when she was seven years old.
She went on to study Philosophy & German Studies at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver . Originally, she didn’t plan on pursuing interior design as a career”I didn’t know interior design was a career. When I was at university, I was like “I don’t want to pick paint and fabric for a living, that sounds boring.””
After she moved to Calgary in Canada with her best friend, she landed a job working at Ellipsis Design, a design firm that sold furniture that did home consultations which served as her introduction the world of design. She was part of a team that designed furniture which was constructed in China and then sent to Calgary to be sold to clients.
That stint led her to gain more of an interest in the option of pursuing a career in interior design. “Prior to that, I hadn’t done anything professionally design-wise. I decided that I didn’t want to stay in Calgary so I moved back to Vancouver. I thought “You know what? I don’t totally know what I want to do with my career right now but I want to have my own business even though I don’t know what that looks like right now. I’ll just enrol in design school and see what happens from there”.”
Karin decided to take a step into investing in her craft by enrolling into the British Columbia Institute of Technology to study interior design and ended up finding her calling.
She later dropped out after her tutor failed one of her final projects which meant she would have had to repeat the course in order to do the diploma course she had set on studying afterwards to be fully qualified. She came to the decision to leave upon realising “At that time, I was doing my training part time, I had already gone to university, done a double major, I had studied abroad and had a full time job whilst I was going to design school at Stantec Consulting, a huge engineering and architecture firm doing tons of sustainability work and working on a number of amazing buildings around Vancouver.”
Having a couple of experiences from working with other firms under her belt, Karin worked with a residential design firm after design school. After a few months, she decided to take the plunge and venture out on her own and launch House of Bohn, her own interior design creative agency with her first project was working on a restaurant.
“The cost of not following your heart, is spending the rest of your life wishing you had.” – Karin Bohn
Eight years later, she has built an impressive empire. Herself and her female strong team have propelled into designing luxury residential properties and and commercial boutiques for top end clients across the world. She’s decorated with many accolades, a few being Contessa Award Winner for Salon Interior Designer of The Year in 2016 and two-time Georgie Award Winner for Best Multi-Family Kitchen and Best Condo Renovation over $300,000 in 2015.
In the past, she struggled with imposter syndrome at the beginning of her career with feeling like she was unqualified having not finished design school but her knack at being persistent with following her vision and embracing her entrepreneurial spirit paid off in the end. She has demonstrated how creating your own path may be anxiety-ridding but can be what serves you in the most fulfilling way by trusting your own vision.
Karin Bohn serves as a true testament that hard work, taking a risk and following something that sparks you up inside is the way to achieve success, especially in the moments where you feel uncertain with what the future holds.
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