How Emily Henderson Became One of the Country's Most Famous Interior Designers

Welcome to Second Life, a podcast spotlighting successful women who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief content officer at Who What Wear, each episode will give you a direct line to women who are game changers in their fields. Subscribe to Second Life on iTunes, and stay tuned. 

This week, we're rebroadcasting and expanding upon one of our favorite Second Life episodes from the archives with Emily Henderson.

Even if you're not a big follower of interior design, you've probably at least heard of Emily Henderson. The prolific home style expert and design guru is a winner of HGTV Design Star (and now host for the network), has her own website, is New York Times best-selling author of Styled: Secrets for Arranging Rooms, from Tabletops to Bookshelves, and is Target’s home expert and spokesperson. Additionally, she's inching toward one million followers on Instagram, where she documents her flurry of drool-worthy projects (it's seriously a must-follow).

While it may be hard to believe that Henderson ever did anything besides what she's doing now, before she became a highly successful interior designer, she worked as a prop stylist for editorial shoots for years. Upon moving from New York to L.A., Henderson realized that it would be difficult to continue her full-time career as a prop stylist there and applied to HGTV's Design Star as a joke in 2010; she ended up winning. 

Head to iTunes to subscribe to Second Life, and listen to this episode to hear more about how Design Star kick-started Henderson's second career. Keep scrolling to get a glimpse of her jaw-dropping work.

Next up, find out how Mandy Moore went from touring with *Nsync to This Is Us.