FUTURE PROOF YOUR STYLING BUSINESS BEFORE YOU NEED TO...

There is a slightly dangerous moment in business when everything is working. Your clients are happy, your diary is reasonably full, referrals are coming in and you know how to deliver your service.

There isn’t an obvious reason to change anything, which is precisely why it can be the hardest time to change because the real problem is waiting.

From my experience working within big businesses, they rarely become outdated overnight, it comes on gradually and in the case of styling, it starts with a client asking for remote appointments, then another asks for digital recommendations, someone wants their wardrobe on their phone and someone else wants help packing.
Instagram enquiries increase, your WhatsApp becomes unmanageable so you pivot and start creating spreadsheets (god I hate them), then another because that first one didn’t really do what you wanted it to do… “ah shit, that didn’t work either so let’s make a pdf.” Ok, lets land on a pdf with a folder of links maybe? At this point you are in a pickle and you are spending more time on paperwork and trying to create a system - than actually styling your clients.

None of these things are a crisis in themselves, individually they’re just adaptations, collectively, they tell you something: the business has moved on.

Analogue isn’t bad, this is an important distinction and I’m not suggesting that traditional styling is obsolete, I want to be super clear on this. There is still enormous value in meeting someone face-to-face, of physically editing a wardrobe and in shopping together. The problem isn’t analogue styling, it’s an entirely analogue business in a world that isn’t analogue anymore.

I think the answer is to think hybrid. The most resilient model may not be either completely traditional or completely digital, it might be a mixture of both.

HOW WOULD A HYBRID MODEL LOOK?
It could look a little like this:
1. In-person consultation + digital wardrobe.
2. Shopping day + digital edit.
3. Seasonal wardrobe edit + ongoing remote styling.
4. Your personal brand + directory discovery.
5. Existing clients + new digital clients.
6. Worldwide digital clients + digital services.

The point isn’t to replace what already works, it’s to add another layer around it, that makes the business more adaptable without requiring you to throw away the model you’ve spent years (or decades in a lot of cases) building.

You don’t need to predict the future, nobody knows exactly what personal styling will look like in ten years and that’s ok, clairevoyant wasn’t on our cv’s last time I checked. What we need is to make our businesses capable of responding to the future, that’s a much more manageable task than predicting it.

If your clients move further online, you can move with them. Say for example that digital styling grows, you can accommodate it. If digital wardrobes become normal, yours are already there. If clients expect more ongoing access, you have a way to provide it and if you want to reach clients beyond your local area, you have another route to market.

That’s the real opportunity in digitising an analogue styling business. It isn’t about becoming futuristic for the sake of it. What we are doing is becoming flexible enough for whatever comes next.

FASHPACK is one way of doing that: a digital studio for stylists who want to bring their existing clients online, alongside a directory for those who want another route to new clients worldwide. You can use one, the other, or both - the choice is yours.

But the bigger point isn’t FASHPACK (although I am super obsessed with my own creation so for me it is lol) it’s the shift itself. The personal styling industry is changing. Your clients have already changed and you need to give your business the permission to change with them.

The best time to future-proof your business is probably not when you have to, it’s while everything is still working.

Want to see how FASHPACK could help your styling business? Click here

Next up…
FOUNDER CHAT