THE BUSINESS OF PERSONAL STYLING HAS CHANGED

Personal styling has traditionally been a remarkably analogue business. A client books an appointment. You meet them somewhere. You go through a wardrobe, visit the shops, create some outfits, send a few links and, eventually, the appointment ends.

The relationship often ends with it. Of course, plenty of stylists have built incredibly successful businesses this way, but the industry has changed around them.

Clients now work remotely. They travel more, shop online, send photographs rather than physically bringing things to you. They expect information to be available when they need it and increasingly, they don’t necessarily need their stylist to be standing next to them to get value from their stylist’s expertise.

The interesting question isn’t whether personal styling should become digital. It already has. The question is whether the stylist’s business infrastructure has caught up?

The appointment shouldn’t be the product. The appointment is simply one way of delivering your expertise. What your client is actually paying for is your eye, your judgement, your ability to edit, your understanding of proportion, colour, lifestyle, personality and, perhaps most importantly, your ability to make getting dressed feel easier.

None of that requires you to be physically present.

A digital wardrobe means you can work from what a client already owns. An edit means you can make recommendations without waiting for the next appointment. A travel wardrobe can be created without meeting at all. The styling remains personal, the delivery becomes more flexible. This matters commercially too…

There is another side to digitising your business that is less talked about. Your time is finite. Your expertise isn’t.

If every piece of value you deliver requires another appointment in your diary, there is a natural ceiling to the business. Digital delivery doesn’t magically remove that ceiling but it does give you another way of packaging your expertise.

And perhaps more importantly, it gives your client a reason to keep using you between appointments.

That changes the relationship from:

“I’ll see you next season.”

to:

“I’ll see you when you need me.”

That’s a much more interesting business.

The modern stylist doesn’t need to become a tech company. This isn’t an argument for replacing the personal part of personal styling. Quite the opposite, technology should deal with the things that don’t require your expertise so that you have more time for the things that do.

That is the thinking behind FASHPACK’s Private Access: a digital studio for stylists who already have their own clients, allowing them to style from a client’s real wardrobe, set their own prices and keep 100% of their styling fees.

The technology is the infrastructure. You’re still the stylist and I suspect that’s where the industry is heading. Not towards less personal styling, towards more ways to deliver it.

FASHPACK FOR STYLISTS
Bring your existing clients onto your own digital studio with Private Access, or use the FASHPACK Directory to meet new ones. Many stylists do both.

STEP INTO MODERN PERSONAL STYLING