Why Simply Luxe Organizing starts with how households live
Ryen Toft is founder and CEO of Simply Luxe Organizing, a luxury home organizing and move management company serving households across San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles. The conversation explores how estate-management experience shaped the company’s whole-home approach, how referrals and search bring in clients, and why a repeatable process matters more than choosing matching bins first.
Build organizing systems around how a household lives, then choose products to support them. Documenting the process early can also make good work easier to repeat.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
My grandparents, Grammy and Grampy, taught me "a place for everything," and I still hear that on every job. Before Simply Luxe, I managed estates for elite homes in San Diego and Orange County. Some of those estates were up to 50,000 square feet, and I ran several homes at once (one even had a moat). I started organizing homes on the side in 2012. I wrote the business plan in a UC San Diego program, and in 2019 I went all in and built a team. What makes us different is that estate-management background. We look at the whole home, curate products thoughtfully, and build every system around how the household actually lives. We don’t just make a space look pretty for a photo.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
My first clients came through word of mouth, with friends telling friends. Today new business comes from a lot of different paths: Yelp, Google, AI search, social media and still plenty of word of mouth. Our media work helps too. We’ve been the resident organizing team on FOX 5 San Diego for more than six years, and my tips have run in People, Real Simple and The San Diego Union-Tribune. San Diego Reader readers voted us Best Home Organizers four years in a row, from 2021 through 2024.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was going all in in 2019 and building a team instead of doing everything myself. That’s what lets us serve three regions with local Luxe Organizers in each. The mistake that taught me the most was waiting too long to spend money on solutions. If I had invested sooner in the help and tools we needed, we would have grown faster.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Social media has changed what some clients expect. Some people come to us focused on products first, like the perfect matching bins, before they’ve decluttered. We’ve adapted by guiding them through decluttering and setting up a system for how they actually live first, then choosing products that fit it.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Document your process from the very start, with photos and notes on what works, so you can show it and repeat it. And don’t stress about social media. It’s worth having, but early on the return is small compared with word of mouth and search.
Thank you to Ryen Toft and the team at Simply Luxe Organizing for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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