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The AI-Powered Rebrand: Dixie Willard's Journey to Poised & Plumb | AI for Interior Designers™

AI for Interior Designers™ Podcast

The AI-Powered Rebrand: Dixie Willard's Journey to Poised & Plumb

How a seasoned design pro used a custom GPT, ChatGPT copywriting, and targeted SEO tools to complete a full business rebrand in under a week — and the exact process she used to do it.

Ep. 44 ✦ Jenna Gaidusek ✦ Dixie Willard February 2025

This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording, then edited by the author for accuracy and details.

Key Takeaways

A full business rebrand — new name, repositioned services, updated website copy, and refreshed blog content — took Dixie less than one week using AI tools. The key was starting with strategy before touching the website.
Training a custom GPT on your own past content is the most reliable way to get AI to write in your actual voice. Dixie uploaded previous blog posts and the output immediately sounded like her — not generic AI.
AI is most useful in a rebrand when used in defined phases: strategy and positioning first, service structuring second, naming and messaging third, website and content last. Jumping straight to copy without strategy produces generic results.
When AI starts repeating itself or giving flat answers, start a fresh session. Context accumulation in long threads can limit the quality of output — a new conversation with a tighter prompt often produces much better results.
AI-generated content and SEO optimization are complementary, not competing. Dixie used Yoast SEO with her Showit/WordPress site to fine-tune AI-written content for search visibility — a workflow that is faster and more effective than doing either step alone.

Episode Guest

Dixie Willard

Founder, Poised & Plumb

Dixie Willard is a seasoned design industry professional who recently completed a full business rebrand to Poised & Plumb — a process she executed in under a week using AI tools. Her experience spans interior design practice, business development, and content creation, and she brought all of that expertise to bear on building a custom AI workflow that delivered real, usable outputs rather than generic drafts.

Poised & Plumb Rebranding Custom GPT Interior Design

Poised & Plumb ↗ Instagram ↗

How Dixie Rebranded in Under a Week

Dixie needed to pivot her business — new name, new positioning, updated services, refreshed web copy, and revised blog content. The traditional timeline for this kind of rebrand, done without AI, runs weeks to months. Hers took less than one week. That is not because she cut corners. It is because she built a workflow that used AI intelligently at every stage, from the strategy layer down through the final copy.

The most important decision she made: starting with strategy before touching the website. Designers who go straight to ChatGPT and say "write my website copy" get generic output because they have not given the model the information it needs to be specific. Dixie went through a deliberate sequence — and the results reflected that discipline.

1

Business strategy and positioning first. Before writing a single word of copy, she used ChatGPT to analyze market gaps, identify her specific niche, and refine what made her offering distinct. AI as a thinking partner, not a copywriter.

2

Service structuring and packaging. Used ChatGPT to break down and reorganize her service offerings — how to present them, what to include in each tier, and how to price and describe them in terms that speak to her ideal client.

3

Naming and messaging with a custom GPT. She trained a custom GPT on her past blog posts so the model understood her voice, vocabulary, and tone before generating any new content. Business name ideas and brand messaging came from this tool — and actually sounded like her.

4

Website copy and SEO. With strategy, structure, and voice established, ChatGPT wrote website copy that spoke directly to her ideal clients. She then ran it through Yoast SEO on her Showit/WordPress site to optimize for search visibility before publishing.

5

Blog content refresh. Existing blog posts were revised using the same custom GPT — updating them to align with the new brand identity without losing the history and authority she had already built with that content.

"What could have taken weeks was done in less than a week — including website updates and blog revisions. AI did not do it for me. It did it with me, faster than I could have done it alone."

— Dixie Willard

The Custom GPT That Sounded Like Her — Not Like AI

The most transferable part of Dixie's process is the custom GPT built on her own content. This is the solution to the most common complaint designers have about AI-generated writing: it does not sound like them. It sounds polished, confident, and completely generic.

Training a custom GPT on your past work changes that fundamentally. By uploading previous blog posts — content you actually wrote, in your actual voice, on your actual topics — you give the model a library of your specific vocabulary, your sentence patterns, your preferred level of formality, and the subjects you care about. When you then ask it to write new content, it is drawing from your material rather than averaging across everyone else's.

How to build your own: In ChatGPT, go to My GPTs and create a new custom GPT. In the instructions field, describe your brand voice, audience, and tone. Then upload a selection of your best-written blog posts, proposals, or email newsletters as reference documents. The more specific your instructions and the more representative your uploads, the better the outputs.

Dixie found the custom GPT especially useful for the brand messaging work — generating name ideas and taglines that felt distinctive rather than generic. The model had enough context to suggest options that fit who she actually is, not who a generic interior designer might be.

Prompting Strategies That Actually Work

Dixie shared the specific approaches that made her rebrand workflow produce usable outputs rather than frustrating rounds of generic drafts. These are practical, repeatable techniques that apply beyond rebranding to any design business context.

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Be specific about what kind of thinking you want. If you want creative exploration, say "think creatively about this." If you want critical evaluation, say "evaluate this objectively and tell me where it falls short." Generic prompts produce generic outputs.

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Start a fresh session when quality drops. In long conversations, ChatGPT can start repeating ideas, losing focus, or getting stuck in a pattern. Rather than trying to redirect within the same thread, start a new session with a tighter, more specific prompt. Fresh context produces fresher output.

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Use phases, not one giant prompt. Break the work into discrete steps: brainstorm first, structure second, draft third, refine fourth. Asking AI to do all of it at once in one prompt produces something that does none of it particularly well.

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Train before you prompt. Any time you want AI to produce content in your voice, give it your content first. Upload documents, paste your writing, or build a custom GPT. The model can only match what it has seen.

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Pair AI-generated content with SEO tools. AI can write search-optimized content, but having a dedicated SEO tool like Yoast to verify and refine it closes the gap between "reasonably optimized" and "actually ranking." Do not skip this step if discoverability matters to you.

The Tools Dixie Used in Her Rebrand

The full rebrand used a small, intentional set of tools — not a sprawling stack. Each one had a specific job in the process.

ChatGPT + Custom GPT The foundation of the entire rebrand. Used for strategy analysis, service structuring, naming, brand messaging, and website copywriting. The custom GPT — trained on Dixie's past blog posts — handled all content that required her specific voice.

Showit + WordPress Her existing website platform. AI-generated copy was implemented directly into the Showit site and then fine-tuned using WordPress's Yoast SEO plugin for search optimization before publishing.

Yoast SEO Used to analyze and optimize AI-generated website copy and blog content for search visibility — checking keyword density, readability, meta descriptions, and structured content requirements.

AI for Business Strategy ChatGPT in a conversational research role — asking questions about market positioning, niche differentiation, and service packaging to build the strategic foundation before any content was written.

Frequently Asked Questions

In ChatGPT, go to your account settings and select "My GPTs," then create a new GPT. In the configuration, write clear instructions about your brand voice — describe your tone, your typical audience, the subjects you focus on, and any specific language patterns you use or avoid. Then upload your best existing written content: blog posts, email newsletters, proposals, or any writing that genuinely represents how you communicate. The quality of the output directly reflects the quality and representativeness of what you upload. Upload your best work, not your most recent work.

Specificity in the prompt is everything. Instead of "help me with my positioning," give the model specific context: your current client type, your geographic market, the services you offer, what you are trying to change, and what kinds of clients you want more of. Then ask specific questions: "What are the most underserved niches in residential interior design for clients in [your market]?" or "Evaluate these three positioning options and tell me which has the most distinctive differentiation and why." The more specific the input, the more specific and useful the output.

Yes — but it requires the same SEO optimization that any web content requires. AI-generated copy is not automatically well-optimized; it may include relevant keywords naturally, or it may not, depending on how the prompt was framed. The workflow Dixie used — generate copy in ChatGPT, then run it through Yoast SEO for optimization — is a reliable approach. Yoast checks keyword density, readability score, meta description quality, internal linking suggestions, and structured content requirements. Passing those checks makes AI-generated content as search-viable as human-written content.

Strategy and positioning before anything. Website copy is just the written expression of decisions you should already have made about who you serve, what you offer, how you are different, and what you want to be known for. If those answers are not clear, AI-generated copy will be generic no matter how well you prompt it — because it is accurately reflecting the vagueness of what you gave it. Dixie's sequence: market analysis → niche definition → service structuring → brand messaging → website copy. Each step informed the next, and the copy at the end of that chain was specific because everything before it was.

The key is updating for alignment while preserving the keywords and URL structure that already have search history. Dixie used her custom GPT to rewrite blog posts in the new brand voice — but the process was revision, not replacement. She kept the core topic, the existing URL, and the primary keyword targeting intact. What changed was the voice, the framing, and any outdated references. For posts that were performing well in search, she was especially careful not to change the elements that search engines had already indexed and associated with rankings. AI can do this kind of targeted revision well if you prompt it explicitly: "Rewrite this post in my brand voice but keep the keyword targeting and URL-relevant content intact."

Learn the Workflow Dixie Used

The Virtual AI Design Tech Summit — Live AI Strategy for Designers

The summit covers exactly the kind of work Dixie did: custom GPT building, content strategy, tech stack decisions, and business positioning with AI. Structured, practical, and built for designers who want results, not theory.

Virtual AI Design Tech Summit ↗ Visit Poised & Plumb ↗