How Design Well Spent Translates Brands into Physical Spaces

“You see here at our office, we’ve got a lunch and learn happening for the team,” Wray said. “They are learning a little bit more about some retail fixtures for our projects.”

The shelving, display units, and custom casework being discussed are details customers may barely notice when they walk into a finished store. But inside a design studio, they are part of the decisions that determine whether a space feels intentional and whether an ambitious concept can actually be built within a client’s budget.

That attention to what happens between an idea and a finished space runs throughout Design Well Spent.

“We are an interior design firm that specializes in commercial retail and hospitality work,” Wray told Seattle Today as she showed us around the studio.

The firm also works across workplace and multifamily projects, but Wray describes its broader focus more simply: designing “spaces where people come together.”

That can mean a fast-casual restaurant, a hotel reception area or a retail store. In each case, the team is often tasked with taking a brand that may already exist through its logo, packaging, digital presence, and visual identity and figuring out what that brand should feel like when someone physically walks through the door.

For Wray, that work comes with years of experience designing spaces for some of the country’s most recognizable companies.

“Hi Seattle, I’m Tobi Wray, and I am the founder and CEO of Design Well Spent Company,” she said during our visit.

Wray founded the company in 2020 after a decade in senior corporate design roles. She previously served as senior manager of design for specialty retail at Amazon, where her work included physical store concepts such as Amazon Books and Amazon 4-Star. Before Amazon, she led Starbucks’ Americas concept design team, developing formats for the company’s core brand as well as other concepts.

Wray earned her interior design degree from Cornish College of the Arts, where she later served as an adjunct instructor. She is NCIDQ certified and has held leadership roles within the Pacific Northwest design community. Today, Design Well Spent operates as a women-owned and women-led Seattle studio.

But walking through the office also revealed why Wray does not see the company as simply an interior design practice.

“We actually have a brand services team here at Design Well Spent,” she explained. “We can develop brands, any brands, from scratch, and translate that into physical spaces.”

That ability to handle both sides of the process is central to the firm’s approach. Rather than receiving a finished brand identity from an outside agency and then trying to translate it into architecture and interiors, the team can begin thinking about the brand and the physical customer experience together.

“Often the heart of that comes into play with really understanding the root of the brand, who their target customer is, and what the customer experience wants to be,” Wray said.

It is an approach that becomes particularly important when the physical space comes with constraints that have little tolerance for design mistakes.

One of the firm’s most visible recent projects is at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

“At DWS, we’ve recently designed a project at SeaTac Airport and their new C Concourse,” Wray said. “It was a really complicated project that we had to get executed in time for the World Cup.”

Design Well Spent developed the pitch and spatial concept for local restaurant chain Great State Burger, helping position the company for a Port of Seattle lease before carrying the project through construction.

The restaurant sits within the airport’s expanded C Concourse, a major redevelopment adding roughly 145,000 square feet across four floors above the existing terminal. For Design Well Spent, however, the challenge was not simply creating an attractive restaurant. It was creating one that could function inside one of the region’s most tightly controlled environments and be completed against a fixed opening schedule.

“This is not our first airport project,” Wray said as she described the additional layers involved in designing beyond an airport security checkpoint.

“Airport retail always comes with its unique challenges. Namely, airport security and any projects post-security, as well as fire codes, durability, and all the requirements that go along with airport work and their approval.”

Those requirements affect decisions that customers may never see. Workers and materials have to move through controlled areas. Finishes must withstand relentless traffic. Designs pass through multiple levels of review, and delays in one part of the process can affect everything that follows.

Back inside the Seattle studio, the lunch-and-learn session we encountered at the beginning of our visit suddenly carried more weight. A conversation about fixtures might seem far removed from the finished restaurant a traveler encounters at Sea-Tac, but the two are part of the same process.

For Design Well Spent, translating a brand into a physical space is not simply about determining how a room should look. It is about figuring out how an idea survives budgets, building codes, materials, construction schedules, and, in some cases, airport security — and still feels like the brand when the doors finally open.