PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the secrets of a Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure personal styling business and step into their creative CEO era.

We'll go beyond the typical snoozefest, cookie-cutter, business advice out there to share business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make an unapologetic fuck ton of money.

I'm Nicole, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. Now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Well, let's get into it.

In this episode, I want to talk with you about the different types of personal stylists and what I have come to see as the three levels of personal styling. I think this is a really important conversation because it very much impacts a stylist's marketing.

Because what I see online is that there are a lot of stylists that consider themselves image consultants, which we'll talk about, versus personal stylists, which we'll talk about, versus retail stylists, meaning they work for a store like Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, or something like that. They work within one retailer.

Then there are, as often as confusion within the industry of the people outside of it, it is often felt by stylists, are getting stylists and influencers mixed up because there's this idea that they're always providing links to shopping and we're providing links to shopping sometimes so people confuse us and often, some stylists believe that that is why they are price shopped.

But the story is a little bit deeper than that. So I want to spend some time today breaking down these concepts so that we all have a working definition of what the different types of stylists there are so that when you are making your marketing claims, you are making the appropriate marketing claim for the type of service that you have.

Now, some of the things, the categories I'm going to talk about today are not things that I've ever heard anyone talk about so I had to give these things names. We're going to talk about retail stylists, we're going to talk about what I call transactional stylists, and then we're going to talk about transformational personal styling, which I believe is a newer way of looking at style and requires a fair amount of parsing out in order to help people understand the differences between each of these levels and why the transactional and the transformational level often become confused, not just among stylists, but most importantly among the people that hire stylists.

I think that we tend to not when we're in the field, we're doing the work, our head is down, and we're building businesses, we're not really thinking often about the way that we talk about our services. The common types of ways that all types of stylists, whether they work in retail, whether they work in their image consultants, they consider themselves personal stylists, or they do color analysis, or body shape analysis, whatever it is, you're going to hear the same types of claims and the same types of “promises” to clients.

I think that what's ending up happening is that we are watering down and confusing some stuff, which means that the client is expecting to have this type of experience and they're coming out with a different type of experience and it's just causing more heartache than it needs to.

I also want this conversation to give you some freedom and to open your eyes and to really start thinking critically about how you would want to categorize yourself as a stylist because every single category I'm going to talk about, you can be profitable in, you can make a difference in people's lives, and you will have repeat clients if you do it well.

One is not better than the other, they are just different ways of having the conversation and different levels of depth that is available in the interaction between the stylist and the client because of the contexts around them.

Let me get into it a little bit more. The first level I want to talk about is retail styling. Now interestingly, this came after personal styling and image consulting and that's like a retroactive thing that stores have put into place.

Sometimes the “stylists” within these stores, some of them have more experience. They have some more training than an average salesperson on the floor. But what's important to note about this is that the public considers retail stylists personal stylists.

This is important from the consumer's point of view. They don't always understand the depth of which personal stylists, image consultants, whatever—I'm going to use those two words interchangeably for the purpose of this part of the conversation—they don't understand the difference between that and an independent stylist, say, because they don't know the level of closet editing and shopping and back and forth and discussion about what the client wants and helping the client get like a language for their style, they have no familiarity with the process.

So to them, I can go to Nordstrom and work with someone for free, which isn't true because they're getting commissioned, or I can spend all this money for a stylist. So perceptually, it is the same to the average person.

This is why how you talk about being a personal stylist is so critical. Because if you're saying the same things that Nordstrom is even saying in their marketing, like, “I help people be confident, I get you outfits, I save you time,” well, why would I, as an outside person, think that you're any different than the person I can go to at Nordstrom?

It's important because this seems so basic to you probably as a stylist, but it's not to other people. I want to really help you as a stylist try to train yourself to look at what you do from the outside perspective so that you can be even more clear in your marketing and even more thoughtful and forthcoming about what the client experience is actually like.

I don't think anyone's trying to trick anyone. I think that most people don't even stop to think about it. But as stylists, they get just as frustrated at people not understanding them, and really, it's our job as stylists to make it clear.

This doesn't make me put anybody down, but we do have to talk about our services in ways that lend outside people to get the differences. One of the things about retail styling is even if you are a relatively well-trained stylist, because many personal stylists, image consultants, independent stylists came from the retail world.

I remember all of my jobs in high school were in retail and that's the case for many stylists that go into having their own personal styling business. Most of us come from that world. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's limited in the fact that 9 times out of 10—there are some exceptions to this—but stylists in the store are only able to provide for the client what's in the store, what's in season at that moment, they don't have the whole mall or all the whole internet to go to to get the client their style so that automatically limits it.

The fact that if you're in a store that has like one line of clothing and it is like, I don't know, think of like an Ann Taylor or something like that, that if you go into that store, you're seeing a specific type of style, not like Nordstrom or Neiman or something where you have a lot of different brands, in those cases, that's not really styling in the same way that an independent stylist does it, not because that stylist isn't talented, not because they couldn't put together killer looks, but because the style is already defined by the store.

It's not like there's any level of looking into the person's identity and then translating it into a style based on a multitude of options. You're just going with what's on the floor, which usually dictates the style in a lot of retailers.

That is why I consider that to be the most limited. There are plenty of stylists who have been a retailer for a long time and are really good at their job, and in some cases, are more able to communicate well with a client because of all of their sales experience and their experience with the public.

So it doesn't mean that this person, this stylist, isn't having a deep impact on the people that they are working with. It just means that they are limited in their scope of work by the context of the store or the retailer they work for. There’s that.

Again, important for us all to remember that so many stylists have come from that world. Then the next level is what I call transactional. Here's the truth. The majority of the field is here right now. I was here for the majority of my career.

What's problematic about not knowing the difference between transactional personal styling and what I'm going to talk about is transformational personal styling is that almost every stylist that is marketing themselves is marketing themselves as somebody that's going to lead the client through a process that's going to get them a transformation.

But a lot, and I mean 80% of stylists, personal stylists, image consultants, however you want to call it, do not have a process that actually taps deep enough into the person's identity and allows the space needed for some of the realities to come to the surface of how that person thinks about themselves in order for it to create the type of transformation we promise in marketing.

This idea of like, “You're going to be so confident and you're going to know what to wear every day, your inside and your outside will match,” let me be honest with you, most human beings right now in this world that have the money to hire an independent personal stylist are so busy and so overwhelmed by life in terms of just the sheer rate at which information is coming at them.

They are not spending a ton of time, even if they're in therapy, which so many people are and that's wonderful, thinking about what does it even mean for my internal world and my personal style to be aligned?

Quite frankly, if we're really going to get into it, is that even a thing that we can promise people? Because the reality of the situation is that, hopefully, the clients you work with will be evolving and changing as human beings so their style should be changing.

When we talk about things like having an investment in your wardrobe and not needing to shop all the time, in some ways, that's actually misleading because if a person is growing and you're truly creating a personal style that's a reflection of that growth because you're saying your inside and your outside are actually aligning, you should never be promising clients that their wardrobe will last them for 5 or 10 years. It shouldn't be.

That's not even about the quality of the clothes, which is a whole other podcast topic, it's really just about the reality of the way we talk about these things, which is if it is the case that we want our clients to have this inner and outer congruence in how they dress and how they identify, then there should be a change in that over time.

So when I look at what I call transactional personal styling, it has a few hallmarks, and you can be a personal stylist, you can identify as an image consultant and have some kind of training, you could not have any kind of formal training, you could have gone to school for it, all of it is irrelevant.

I know that a lot of image consultants that I was doing some research on the differences, just in terms of how these things are defined in the industry, the idea is that image consulting deals with the whole person's appearance in terms of their body language, sometimes the way that they speak, though sometimes there are image consultants that do voice coaching, their hair, their makeup, their clothes, it's all about how they're presenting all aspects of themselves, and there is a fair amount of training that goes into image consulting.

They also usually have done the color analysis, body shape analysis, those types of things. They have some sort of experience and some sort of training around that. Often, what is fascinating when I was looking up these details, it was really talked about how image consulting is typically thought of as—according to all the sources online that I saw—for people that are public-facing and/or going into the professional arena, they're going to stylists for their professional image.

You're going to see that looking a little bit like image coaching for executive presence is another way of saying it. That is image consulting. Then there is personal styling. A personal stylist is defined in these circles online when we're doing the difference between the two as a stylist that primarily focuses on assisting clients and selecting clothing and accessories that suit their body type and lifestyle and is very related to the trend-driven fashion cycles.

Obviously, that's not true for everybody. These words are not used in the industry necessarily like that. I know people that have image consulting training call themselves a personal stylist and I know people that don't even work with people in an executive presence type way that say that they're an image consultant.

I just want to make sure that our terms are defined just for the sake of it but know that I understand people are using them interchangeably even within the field. What I'm talking about here is transactional personal styling. It doesn't matter how you identify.

What I think of as transactional is that it is often a service that is either led by the client, like I think of personal shoppers as being incredibly efficient with time, but often is led by the client's list of wants and needs, which I say the client always has last say in this no matter what the styling container, but it's like they go to the stylist or they go to the shopper and they say, "Hey, I need black pants, I need this and that." It's not coming from a bigger discussion of style discovery or style exploration.

That is an example of something that is definitely transactional. It is efficient. It is based on a need of basically just getting the clothes in the closet. There isn't a whole lot of internal reflection and there's nothing wrong with that. There are people that don't want that internal reflection, and that's really important for me to point out here.

In my career for 14 years, I saw tons of people who had zero interest in the introspective part of my process, and quite frankly, we were a bad fit. But for somebody else, I think honestly, a personal shopper probably would have been a better deal for them.

That's why I'm saying it's really important to think about what we want to be and how we're acting and what our service is giving the client because there are also going to be people that don't want to have these conversations that lead to greater depths of their identity.

And there are people that expect on the other end of the spectrum that every time you're working with a personal stylist, you're getting deep into their identity. They're just different expectations of the process, whether that be because of their education on what stylists do or because of the people that they follow, or whatever, or they just don't want to look at their style that way. They want to look good, but they don't need it to be an expression of their soul, for lack of a better term, all fine.

But that's still somewhat transactional in that it is based on often, like I said, either client-driven. There may not be a lot of style discovery, meaning that there may not be a lot of looking into why the person likes what they like, why they're attracted to certain types of styles, or why certain styles don't feel right on them, even if they like the way they look on other people.

The analysis part is skipped over, which I think is true of way more stylists than is even realized. There are stylists that feel incredibly anxious having conversations that are not directly related to the clothes or to the things in front of them when they're with the client.

If it's not about the outfit in front of them, if it's not about the clothes that they just bought, if it's not about in the dressing room, they're not having a deeper, bigger conversation unless it's being stumbled upon. It's not part of the process.

Again, nothing wrong, it's more of a transaction. Even people that are trained in say color analysis, that is a limited-in-scope type of experience. Is it useful? Is it powerful? Does it make a difference in people's lives? Sure, absolutely. And it's not the whole picture.

You cannot say, “Here are 30 colors that look great on you,” and then not have a conversation about what colors resonate with the person and why and what those colors give off to other people and to themselves when they walk through the world. If you're not connecting those two things, it's a transaction. Again, it's useful. It has its place. Lots of people love color analysis because it makes getting dressed easier for them.

I would argue that if you're in a transformational styling service, it's not always easier. It's often harder before it gets easier. So, again, if you do not have the level of one-on-one work with a client that includes style discovery, meaning the client is coming to you with things that they are interested in, in terms of like a Pinterest board or whatever, they're looking at things and being like, "This is what I'm drawn to," then you're looking at it as a stylist and pulling out the themes and having conversation about why those themes may or may not serve them, it's a transaction.

You're getting the clothes in their closet, you're getting them the outfits, you're getting them the list of colors that look good on them, you're getting them the body shape analysis report, it's often very rule-based when it's transactional. It's following a process.

Transformational styling has a process as well, but it's often more of a back-and-forth between the stylist and the client, whereas image consulting and things like color analysis, body shape analysis, the person can or cannot accept those things into their style. But the kind of idea, if there isn't a larger space for the conversation of what will that person be integrating in and maybe the colors or the body shape analysis, is only a starting point.

Some clients love that. Some clients do very well with a rule-based styling system. So that's going to resonate for them. There are some people that do well with that because it gives them the answer and they don't have to think about it. There's also nothing wrong with that.

Also, you can have a client that starts with that, that does their color analysis or does that something that little step into this and feels different in their day-to-day life and then begins to go more down the journey of transformational styling and looking for their identity to be a part of the conversation. But sometimes people need a foothold with the rules, and that's okay too.

Important, this is just a very nuanced conversation, but if you're marketing to being fast, I'm going to give you the answer it being about me just putting the outfits in your closet and you moving on with your life. If there isn't a true amount of style discovery internally from the client and also a conversation of what they're actually wanting to project identity-wise, what feels right to them, then if you are promising deep transformation or deep confidence after, as the result, you're probably going to have some people confused because what you did is you gave them a transaction.

You didn't provide them with a process that is going to lead to a transformation. It's very task-oriented when you're in the transactional kind of world. It can be also very limited in that maybe the services aren't intertwined, so maybe someone just goes in and they only get color analysis or they only get body shape analysis. There isn't a look at what is the person attracted to broadly in inspiration.

Or again, it could be an example of the client in a personal shopping relationship just leading the way and saying, "Oh, these are the things I need. These are the things I like. Go shop for them."

Again, there's nothing wrong with that. I actually think that if more stylists just came out as personal shoppers, they would be happier because some stylists do not want to do the level of depth that transformational styling and what I think people think of in the field as personal styling, how they talk about it.

Not every person wants to be getting into the nitty gritty of why someone feels the way they feel about their style. Some people do, some people don't. Some people do want to be able to do that as stylists, and they don't know how to be with a client when that conversation unveils some difficult things.

I'll give you an example. I found that when I was a stylist, it was a lot easier to create transformational styling services when I went online and had an online course. Many of my personal styling clients who I never would have guessed because they were spending a lot of money for personal styling for me to do it for them were interested in being in the course.

What I knew that would give me by not being in their house and being in their space and being in their business, as I like to say, was an opportunity to offer this reflection and this deeper set of conversations, and I saw that people were very hungry for it.

We had conversations about things like style and age. They were all women, so what views they got about style and money and investing in themselves from their families, their childhood, or the influences that came into their life that helped shape their views on these things?

What I would see is that when we started to have these conversations, the rate at which their personal style radically transformed was next level. Because there is only so much a client can take in when you're in—I'm not saying you can't have a transformational, personal styling service that's in person, you totally can. But it usually takes a little bit longer. It's not like going to be done in two weeks.

You're not going to get a season of clothes done in two weeks. You're going to have to really extend the period of introspection and style looking at the different things they are attracted to in terms of their inspiration and stuff like that.

It’s just not going to happen quickly, bottom line. They may bump up into some stuff. When I was working with clients after I changed my personal styling services from what I learned doing an online program and being in person, I started to mold my one-to-one services to be a mixture of both, which is where I consider this idea of it being transformational comes from, because I could just see the difference.

I was just like giving the people the clothes before and we talked a little bit about it. But if I'm honest, in retrospect, I was often taking a lot of what I saw already in their closet that they liked and running with that in that being just taking those pieces that they really liked and using them as the guidepost for where we’re going in the future, which there's nothing wrong with it's just, again, not a full transformation.

It's not like we're really making this closet over by really looking deeply at things. We're just being like, "Oh, this is working, we're going to do more of it." Again, totally fine, not a problem. People still felt great about the experience and it's just not the same. So we'll come up sometimes in the more transformational service that I'd built out later, and I see this with a lot of my stylist clients who have a pretty deep aspect of their process that includes coaching, introspection, or journaling, there are lots of ways to go about this, when I see that, the difference is really that you can bump up against some stuff for people.

I've had clients talk about sexual abuse or other things that are really painful and difficult. I'm not a therapist so it wasn’t my job to take that on, but I was capable at that point in my career—when I started to be able to integrate this transactional and transformational into a service—I was capable of sitting with the client through that and checking in with it or having very direct conversations about, “Hey, do you think that that might be what's getting in the way of X, Y, or Z?”

Because I had done the work on myself, which is what I think is truly important about understanding when we promise a result and we're saying we're giving a level of depth in our services, have we actually done that level of work to uncover that level of depth in ourself before we're saying we're doing it with clients?

Nine times out of 10, we're not because we're not thinking critically about our marketing. We're just doing what everyone else is doing or trying to be a little bit more original than everybody else, but we're making the same promises.

That's why promising confidence is so incredibly problematic, but not only that, you can't give someone confidence. Confidence is a result of them living in the world with those clothes, with the perceived identity that they're radiating.

That's why sometimes when we just give the client that outfits, we're just doing it, we're just going quickly, we're jamming too many things into our services, we're trying to get it done fast, we're doing multiple seasons at once, which we shouldn't be doing, it's too much, when we're doing that, we're not leaving the space for anybody to notice if the clothes that we're giving the client is actually a reflection of the personality that they want to project out into the world, because when we're not asking that, then we're shocked when people are saying, "Well, I don't really feel confident."

Well, number one, that ain't how it works. You don't give people clothes and they feel confident. Confidence is a result of living in the clothes in the world and feeling like the identity that those clothes are projecting and the identity that they would like to project are aligned.

But if you don't have a process for looking into that, then not only you can never promise confidence, but you're really out of left field promising it because you're not even setting them up to go and have the lived experience of themselves in the clothes.

That is what's critical. Transformational styling is really something that often takes longer. It is where people will spend, if I'm going to be honest with you, a lot more money because it's hard to price shop a stylist that is for a very particular group of people so you tend to have to be a bit more niched in this world versus if you're a personal shopper, I think 9 times out of 10, unless you're talking about men versus women, just because it's brand knowledge, there's no reason why you need to be super, super niched in the sense of like, “Oh, I only do personal shopping for women who are six-figure entrepreneurs.”

No, you don't need that, because it's client-focused. It's really more about your personality and people jive with that and your personal brand and that type of thing. While all of those things are important when you're a personal stylist that is in more of a transformational realm, it requires a level of, I often say, just like nervous system regulation on the part of the stylist that many of us just don't have experience with.

This is a really important conversation from the standpoint of you thinking about what kind of a stylist do I want to be and what are the limitations of each of those different types of styling, whether that be retail styling, whether that be transactional styling, and within that, you can be a personal stylist, an image consultant, doesn't matter how you identify, but maybe doesn't have the level of depth that in your process that you and I both know it would need to make some of the claims that are just like second nature in styling, unless it'll be fast, it'll be efficient, and you'll like it. Okay, fine.

But the truth is that our society has really moved towards clothing as, or the hope, the ideal way of using style, especially as people become more awkwardly mobile and earn more money, this idea that you are projecting your inner world to your outer world via your style isn't like how it's always been. That's not how the world was always thought about style.

It always was a form of communication and projection, personal style or clothes, it was always a form of communication and it often did things more along the lines of, there's a great book about this that talks about class and identity, I'll have to remember what it is and put it in the show notes but it's really fascinating to see how typically in society for a long, long time, people were really using their clothes to signal where they were in the economic stratification of society, not, as so many clients would say, "Oh, I want to be seen as approachable but confident."

That whole world of women that are trying to straddle that world like, "I want to look like I'm in charge, but not like I'm too in charge." Those weren't things that people were always thinking about, and often people's clothes just reflected their status in the society.

I think the working class, noble class, those types of things, they were just common uniforms, but now it's not like that. Now the options are so vast. It's important to think about like, that's the ideal that I think a lot of people are searching for with their personal side, there's like elusive insides and outsides matching deal, and you have a process that you go through that gets some kind of the answer to what their style is, it's not like what colors are good on them, what body shape it has, that's all fine, that can be the starting point.

But if there isn't also this more layered set of discussions in space, I think this is a big one, space and time, I'm not saying like two weeks, but between sessions, but you can't just jam as many things into a personal styling service, particularly a comprehensive one, and not give the client a minute to just take in what happened.

Not give the client a minute to wear some of those clothes and then integrate what they're experiencing with the final outcome of the wardrobe, whether that be you do more shopping or you save the closet edit to the end when they're fully bought into the process and then you get rid of the clothes in terms of just getting rid of them.

You can always do a closet review at the start. All of these things we're going to talk about in more depth, but I wanted to give you some examples of how what we promise as stylists and what the outside expectations of us are as stylists don't align often, especially when we're marketing.

I want to give you a space to think about what kind of stylist do I want to be? How do I want to show up? What does this look like? What skills would I need to get if I wanted to be, say, from a retail stylist to a transactional stylist or a transactional stylist to a transformational stylist?

Or if you're promising a transformational experience and you're like, “You know what, maybe that ain't for me, maybe we need to dial it back,” now, that doesn't mean at any level that you are not providing a wonderful experience or that it won't impact someone's life deeply. It's about what the client is looking for in terms of the outcome of that.

Is it just some cute outfits or is it an identity shift? That is critical. If it's an identity shift, do you have the process and the tools to provide that? We'll talk about each of these in another episode more, but I wanted to kick off this very important conversation and what I think is going to be a really foundational aspect of the work that the styling consultancy will be doing and some of the messaging and the conversations will be happening going forward. Thank you for being here with me and I will talk to you next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.