Starting a family is life changing, for everyone. For one owner of a closet company, having a family and a successful business became part-and-parcel of each other; two sides of the same work-life coin. 

For Marissa Soave, starting a family and the Complete Closet Design company, occurred, almost hand-and-hand, and each grew together in myriad ways. Life lessons informing work; work informing life. 

Which is why Soave says that while her company has created closets and organized solutions for every room in the house and for every type of customer, she loves working with moms.

A great life
Before Complete Closet Design, Soave was a nurse who had just met her future husband. He had recently opened his own contracting company, Greater Midwest Exteriors, and their divergent schedules left little time for a young couple starting a new life together, Soave said from her Shorewood, Illinois, offices, located an hour from Chicago. 

Desiring a career that allowed for, and fostered, family and work led her to the closet industry. Again, family dynamics played a role. “We were remodeling our house. When it was time for our closets we had a few people come in and I became interested in everything design, layout, installation.”

As her interest and knowledge of the industry grew, she partnered with Organizers Direct Industries (ODI), a supplier operating with a non-franchise dealer model that taught her the basics of running the business.

She began using social marketing as a means to attract customers and soon had her first client, a mom with a newborn. Soave remembers the job very well. She had just learned of her own first pregnancy. The customer was breastfeeding, and the baby was crying, and the job site was chaotic. “’Oh, my God,” she thought, ‘I’m going to have to do this too.”

The job too had troubles. “We did a hanging system in her closet, and we didn’t know that when we order a hanging system, we needed to order it with notches up front for the hanging bracket. Well, we ordered it with no notch.”

Soave called her ODI representative who directed her on how to notch the hardware themselves. “It was a rocky start, and I was embarrassed, but we got through it, and she’s happy with it. She still follows us on social media.”

There were more lessons to come, of course. “When I became a mom, I feel like it took it to a whole other level. When you have babies, it’s so chaotic. When I first designed my son’s closet, I thought I knew exactly what I was doing. I had no idea. I made the drawers way too big, and I honestly didn’t even need them. I needed more hanging. I needed more shelving.”

It was lessons like this that helped develop her closet ideals: functionality and style that fit a customer’s lifestyle ... and budget. “That’s when I started to really fall in love with helping moms specifically,” she said. “In a house that can be chaotic, we can relieve the chaos.”

Bringing luxury to all

Making homes more functional for the moms, and non-moms of the world, has become a passion for her. There is, Soave believes, a perception among many consumers that a closet is only for the well-to-do. She wanted her business to be different. 
“Closets can be for everybody, people just like you and me,” she said. “It depends on what your budget is, what you’re trying to achieve.” 

Soave wanted a system, a way to bring to her customers, a variety of options to customize their organizational solutions throughout the house that fit them, both their budget and their aesthetics.

“If you’re looking for just functionality and just a piece peaceful kind of environment we could just do that, or we can make something more custom and intricate.”

Complete Closet Design makes complete solutions for rooms other than closets of course. They make custom home office spaces, mudrooms, pantries, Murphy Beds, entertainment centers and more.

To design a space that showcases the uniqueness of the customer, the company has a wide, and growing, variety of accessories and options from jewelry stations, rod and racks, closet islands, shoe racks and more.

Doors and drawers, which are made of birch and are soft closing, come in myriad styles and are available in Base colors and the company’s Mixology Colors. A range of knob styles and finishes are available. Shelves can be fixed or adjustable.

The Symphony wall organizer line adds slim-lined elegance and flexible functionality. It uses a variety of hooks for scarves, handbags, shoes and jewelry.

Custom lighting include strip lighting, puck lights, lighted shelves and vertical lighting can be added for glamour, distinctive look to the space. They also offer a variety of safes from MyCube safes to store valuables. 

For the garage, sturdy cabinets protect belongings are anchored to the garage wall to create a “floating” cabinet.

Workbenches come in a variety of styles, including Stainless steel, butcher block, as well as laminates including quartz and laminate countertops. 

The options are seemingly endless, which is a good thing for return customers such as moms. “Our customers like having options as their life changes such as moms who made spaces for their family, and now they can have a dream closet of their own.”