Leor Zlotnik – From Goldman Sachs Desk to Design Studio Founder
Before Leor Zlotnik left Goldman Sachs to run LZ Interiors full time, she spent years building the design business alongside her finance career – testing it with real projects, real clients, and no safety net – until the evidence, not a leap of faith, made the decision for her.
A different kind of career pivot
Most people who leave a stable finance job for a creative business talk about it as a leap of faith. Leor Zlotnik talks about it more like a decision that had been building for years, one that finally had enough evidence behind it to act on.
Before LZ Interiors existed, Zlotnik worked at Goldman Sachs. The design work started alongside that job, not instead of it. Early projects were built in whatever hours were left after a demanding finance schedule, and as a single mom, that meant the margins of the day were thin. There was no long runway, no outside investment, no built-in client base. There was a firm belief that the work was good enough to stand on its own, tested in real time against a full-time job that left little room for error.
Why the business came first, then the exit
Zlotnik did not quit finance to try interior design. Design was already working before the exit happened. That order matters. It meant the decision to leave Goldman Sachs was made from evidence, not hope: a growing body of projects, a visual identity that was starting to resonate, and enough client interest to suggest the demand was real.
This is a different story than the one usually told about creative founders. There was no single dramatic moment of quitting to chase a dream. Instead, there were years of building two things at once, until one of them was strong enough to carry the weight on its own.
Building an eye for design while working in finance
Spending years inside institutional finance, before founding LZ Interiors, shaped how Zlotnik approaches design projects now. Finance rewards precision, documentation, and the ability to explain exactly why a decision was made. That habit carried over directly. LZ Interiors is not built around mood boards and vague inspiration. It is built around specific decisions: which material, which finish, which vendor, and why.
Homeowners come to LZ Interiors with a vision they found on Instagram or Pinterest. What they often lack is the ability to execute it: the sourcing knowledge, the sequencing, the understanding of what a material actually costs and how it actually performs once it is installed. That gap between an inspiration photo and a finished room is where the firm's work concentrates.
Building a business through visual identity
Long before LZ Interiors became known through word-of-mouth referrals, its Instagram presence was doing quiet work in the background. Zlotnik treated the platform less as marketing and more as a portfolio, a place to show finished work in enough detail that a prospective client could see the actual decisions behind a room, not just the final photo.
That approach built a following inside the high-end design community over time, not through a single viral moment but through consistency. Every project posted was another data point proving the same thing: that the aesthetic was real, repeatable, and grounded in craft rather than trend.
What the transition actually required
Leaving a Goldman Sachs career to run a design studio full time was not simply a matter of confidence. It required the business to already be functioning as a business: a portfolio, a reputation, and enough demand to replace a finance salary. Zlotnik built that foundation first, then made the change.
As a single parent, the calculation could not be purely emotional. It had to work financially and practically before it could work personally. That constraint shaped the discipline behind the eventual transition. There was less room for a slow build once the leap was made, so the leap only happened once the earlier work had already proven itself.
Alignment as the real measure
Zlotnik does not describe the move from Goldman Sachs to LZ Interiors as a story about escaping one industry for another. It reads more like a story about closing the gap between the work and the person doing it. Finance built the discipline. Design became the outlet for something more personal. The two years spent doing both at once were less a transition than a test, one that had to pass before the rest of the story could happen at all.
