Rethinking How Brands Educate, Engage, and Earn Trust with Design Professionals
The way brands communicate with design professionals is changing — not subtly, but fundamentally.
Interior designers, kitchen and bath professionals, and specifiers are under more pressure than ever: tighter timelines, more complex products, increased liability, and clients who arrive armed with online research and AI-generated ideas. In that environment, traditional marketing — short presentations, surface-level messaging, and one-way promotion — simply isn’t enough.
What designers need now is depth, clarity, and confidence.
What brands need is credibility, trust, and long-term relevance.
At M2 Connect, we believe the future of brand-to-designer engagement is not about louder marketing — it’s about making the interaction matter.
That belief is what led to the launch of Designhounds Bootcamps.
From Promotion to Proficiency
Bootcamps were designed to solve a growing disconnect in the market: brands are innovating faster than ever, while designers are expected to specify, install, and stand behind increasingly complex products with limited real-world training.
Unlike traditional CEU sessions or showroom events, Bootcamps focus on:
- How products are actually built
- How they perform in real installations
- How to specify them correctly
- How to avoid costly mistakes and callbacks
This is product fluency, not product promotion — and it fundamentally changes the relationship between brands and buyers.
As a result, brands are no longer pitching. They are educating partners.
A Scalable, Collaborative Model — Not a One-Off Event
One of the most important design decisions behind the Bootcamp platform was recognizing a simple truth:
If everything runs through one central team, it doesn’t scale — and it doesn’t serve local communities.
Rather than building a touring roadshow, M2 Connect developed a distributed, partner-led model that allows Bootcamps to scale nationally while staying deeply local.
Here’s how it works:
- M2 Connect as Designhounds Brand provides the turnkey infrastructure, including national program strategy, curriculum framework, sponsor sales, event logistics, promotion, attendee curation, and post-event reporting.
- Designhounds PRO Host Studios serve as local venues, hosting Bootcamps within their studios or creative spaces and anchoring the program within their regional design communities. Host Studios participate in a shared sponsorship revenue model.
- Designhounds PRO Training Partners facilitate and moderate Bootcamp sessions on site in collaboration with the Host Studio. Training Partners may be studio-affiliated or independent professionals operating regionally. They are compensated through a daily facilitation stipend, with travel expenses reimbursed as applicable.
This model allows us to expand nationally without losing authenticity, quality, or trust — while creating meaningful leadership opportunities from within our network of established design studios and design professionals.
Inviting Designhounds PRO Studios to Lead Locally
As part of the 2026 rollout, we are actively inviting Designhounds PRO members to apply as official Bootcamp Training Partners.
For participating studios, this means:
- Hosting high-value educational events without carrying the full operational burden
- Elevating their studio as a regional knowledge hub
- Building deeper relationships with both designers and brands
- Participating in a national program with consistent standards and visibility
For brands, it means:
- Access to vetted, professionally engaged design communities
- Consistent program quality across multiple markets
- Longer-format, high-impact interactions that translate into real specification confidence
This is collaboration — not sponsorship theater.
Brooklyn as the Flagship Launch
The inaugural Designhounds Bootcamp will debut in Brooklyn this May in partnership with EcoHiveNY, a design-forward, sustainability-driven creative venue aligned with the program’s mission.
The inaugural Designhounds Bootcamp will debut in Brooklyn this May in partnership with EcoHiveNY, a design-forward, sustainability-driven creative venue aligned with the program’s mission.
From there, the program will expand city by city through local Designhounds PRO partners nationwide.
A New Engagement Standard for the Design Industry
Bootcamps are not just a new event format — they represent a broader shift in how the industry communicates:
At M2 Connect, we see this as the future of brand engagement in the design industry — and a necessary evolution for brands that want to remain relevant in an increasingly informed, demanding marketplace.
- From exposure → to understanding
- From selling → to equipping
- From transactions → to trust
Less marketing.
More mattering.