Meet the DesignHouse Team!
Lauren West - Director, Global Color and Design
Lauren West is the Director of industrial Wood DesignHouse for the Performance Coatings Group. In this role, Lauren helps to create and manage custome color, proprietary finish, and design for the Industrial Wood Coatings segments, highly focused on the Home Furnishings Industry to achieve color and design leadership. She influences, leads, creates, and executes industry strategies and tactical plans to drive market share growth in architechtural building products, furnishings, kitchen and bath, specialty anddistributors.
Holding a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interior Design from Radford University, along with her 30+ year, well-rounded industry skill set, Lauren has a commanding sense of color, materials, finish and style trends. She has advanced experience in working in product development with product designers, most top 100 retailers, and manufacturers. Her industry sales, marketing, and retail experience provides her with solid knowledge on communicating a concept all the way through to an end consumer.
Eric Crosby - Marketing Specialist
Eric Crosby is a highly creative designer and expert in consumer trend research with more than 20 years of experience in color, material, and finishes (CMF), identity development, design management, and strategic design planning. A member of the Sherwin-Williams team since 2014, Eric travels the world observing, researching, and analyzing trends that drive the team’s forecasting reports. DesignHouse stylists use these reports to help create original and authentic wood finishes that are backed by validating quantitative data.
Eric is also the manager of the Virtual Panel Studio, an exclusive digital offering for product developers and designers so they may experience DesignHouse where every they may be. The Virtual Panel Studio houses hundreds of vood finishes that recreate the panel library found at the DesignHouse located in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Ricky McDaniel - Marketing Manager
Ricky McDaniel is the Marketing Manager of the DesignHouse based in Greensboro, North carolina. Ricky leads a team of color stylists in finishing trends for the global wood industry. In this position, he oversees projects for five different wood segements. With over twenty-five years of experience in the finishing industry, his skill set is coprehensive and divers, allowing him to serve as a pioneer of trend forecasting.
Prior to joining Sherwin-Williams, ricky spent eight years of his career supervising at Stanely Furniture in Martinsville, Virginia. here thereafter served as supervisor at bassett Furniture for three years before making the jump to Sherwin Williams.