YOU DON'T HAVE TO FIND EVERY CLIENT YOURSELF

Building a personal styling business requires two very different skills.

1. Styling.

2. Finding people who want to be styled.

Most stylists are naturally much better at the first (including myself), which is understandable. You became a stylist because you love clothes, people, proportion, colour, shopping, wardrobes and putting things together.

You probably didn’t become a stylist because you were desperate to spend your Tuesday afternoon thinking about customer acquisition costs but eventually, every independent stylist has to answer the same question: Where do my next clients come from?

From my experience I have found that your audience isn’t necessarily your client base. You can have a strong Instagram following and still have an empty diary. You can have brilliant testimonials and still need to generate enquiries, and you can be exceptionally good at what you do and still be relatively difficult for the right person to discover. It. Is. Hard. I know this first hand.
The worst part for most is that beginning phase where you qualify, you set up your business and your online presence, there you are raring to go and then…. then you wait.
The beginning of anything is scary and you doubt yourself a 100 times over during that period. Styling isn’t like a high street business, people don’t just wonder into your shop. You don’t have one. A styling business flourishes on word of mouth but until you find your tribe of people to spread the word, that is a lot harder that it sounds.

That’s the slightly uncomfortable reality of running a personal brand. Visibility isn’t the same as conversion. This is where a directory listing can make sense. A directory doesn’t replace your own brand, it can simply be another ‘high street’ or in this case online, door into your business. Restaurants do this all the time for example. They list themselves on platforms like The Fork, Tripadvisor etc to get discovered by customers on that platform. Think of a directory as the discovery tool.

The clients on a directory already know they want a stylist, they just need to find the right one. If you are not listed on a directory, they may not find you. If you have ever tried to search ‘personal stylist’ you will have instantly seen that there are literally thousands and thousands of stylists. If you were a client how would you find you in a sea of thousands? It’s super overwhelming.

That’s the premise behind FASHPACK’s Directory Listing: stylists can list for free, with no monthly subscription, and FASHPACK members can discover and book curated packages directly through their profile. FASHPACK retains a percentage of the platform fee on those directory bookings, while the stylist sets their service price within the platform parameters. FASHPACK only succeeds when the stylist does - it’s that simple.

What kind of stylists are we looking for? Short answer, good ones! (lol).
Seriously, though we are looking for a range of stylists, some that are well known, some just starting out, some who lean more towards a minimalist style and some towards maximalist. We would love to have a broad range of stylists on the platform because our clients need variety, they are seeking a point of difference. That’s what we want to offer and thats the kind of stylist we want to champion. Spots on the directory will be limited, so when and if you do apply, drop us a note on why you think you should be selected - I am interested to hear that unique point of view.

Right lets get back to the topic at hand. What a directory gives you is incremental opportunity. Now, this might be a phrase some of you are familiar with but in the restaurant industry, this phrase is used in pretty much every meeting (a reminder for the restaurant refs, I had my own restaurant marketing consultancy for 15 years so everything for me either comes back to fashion or food).

An incremental opportunity is a chance to gain extra sales, revenue of value that you would not have gotten otherwise. It is growth that happens on top of your normal baseline.

You don’t have to stop building your own brand, you don’t have to stop working with your existing clients, you don’t even have to hand your entire business over to somebody else. You simply have another place where a potential client can find you.

The two models of private access and directory listing don’t compete with each other, in fact, they can actually complement each other, they rub alongside each other.

Your own clients can sit inside your private digital studio or private access as we like to call it. The FASHPACK directory can introduce you to people who don’t know you yet. One supports the business you’ve already built, the other creates the possibility of building something new.

That’s why FASHPACK deliberately doesn’t force stylists to choose which service they want to offer, bring your own clients. meet new ones. or do both.

Looking for an incremental opportunity? Start here