with Julia Reinert
Upholstery has been considered a skilled trade since ancient Egypt. It furnished the courts of Louis XIV, survived the Industrial Revolution, and outlasted every trend that tried to replace it. You know your craft, but have you been using its history as a marketing tool?
In this session, we look at the history of upholstery as a trade, a craft, and a cultural symbol, and then we get practical: how do you take that history and use it to market your work, connect with buyers, and set your shop apart? We'll move into how cultural memory, nostalgic marketing, and brand storytelling can help you attract the right clients and build a brand that reflects the full weight of what you do.
You'll leave with a new way of thinking about your work and a set of tools ready to put into practice.
Julia Reinert has spent her career studying one idea from every possible angle: the stories embedded in the way people have always lived. As the founder of The Lifestyle Historian™, she brings together academic rigor, journalistic instinct, and more than twenty years of marketing and brand strategy to help businesses understand why history is one of the most persuasive forces available to them.
Her foundation is formal and broad. A degree in Third World and Non-Western History from UNC Chapel Hill and graduate work in International Relations gave her the tools to read culture, identity, and collective memory across time and geography. She began her professional life as a newspaper reporter, trained to find the story beneath the story, and carried that sensibility into a long career working with nonprofits, lifestyle brands, artisans, design professionals, and corporate clients across multiple industries.
In 2025, she transformed The Lifestyle Historian™, formerly a passion project on Instagram, into a full-time consultancy with a focused mission: helping brands harness the power of nostalgic marketing and cultural memory to build deeper, more lasting connections with the people they serve. Her clients span interior design and the decorative arts, antiques, tea culture, fashion, hospitality, and travel. She works with businesses at every stage, from emerging studios to established companies navigating brand evolution.
What Julia brings to any room is the understanding that consumers respond to history because history answers the questions that matter most to them: where did this come from, what does it mean, and why should I care? The trades and decorative arts industries are sitting on extraordinary reservoirs of cultural meaning. Julia's work involves helping those industries draw from that reservoir with intention, using historical research, material culture studies, and narrative strategy to turn craftsmanship into a story that sells.
She writes and speaks regularly on the intersection of history, identity, and brand, and she remains, above all, a lifelong student of how people have always made meaning from the objects and spaces around them.
