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.

This episode is going to be super fun. It is a selection of questions that I received from stylists that follow me on Instagram before a couple of my free round table calls that we've been doing. I want to answer some of them here for you because you may be wondering about some of these things.

These are some of the more popular ones that I get and some of the more tricky ones that I think all of us as personal stylists will have experienced in our career at one point or another. So I'm excited to dive into these with you today.

I want to start off with this question because it is so, so interesting to me. How do you maintain a luxury shopping and styling experience for clients during a virtual styling experience when they have to shop on their own and do all their own returns?

Great question, and I think what's really critical about this is to think about how a client thinks about luxury versus how you think about luxury as a stylist. Number one, stylists think about luxury very much in the most traditional ways because we have access to or often are in true luxury brands with our clients.

We know what it's like to go into a Chanel store or a Gucci store and have the client not just be buying like the lipstick. We know what luxury high-end retail service looks like. So we may be assuming and projecting onto the client that that is what they expect from the styling experience.

The flip side of this is that are there some people that that's true for sure? They're very savvy consumers, of which there are more, and they're probably someone that's going to be looking for an in-person experience, but they often may be looking for it more from the convenience standpoint. Convenience is a luxury. They're busy, they don't want to think about it, they don't have time.

I've had clients who, back when I was a stylist, were incredibly wealthy, incredibly successful, and incredibly busy, and it just wasn't a problem for them to handle their own returns or hire, or their assistant did it or they got someone on task to grab it. There are a million ways to have that experience handled, either from the client perspective or from the stylist helping the client. I could talk about that.

But it's important because what often is seen on the other end of the spectrum is that the client thinks of it as the fact that they even have a personal stylist helping them with this is a luxury in and of itself and so it doesn't even occur to them that maybe, in a lot of cases, they shouldn't be printing out the return label for their clothes.

This is again, why it's super important for stylists to know who they are talking to because the definition of a luxury experience is also changing as life changes. There are some people for whom you being only a virtual stylist, if you are virtual, is going to be the thing that actually makes them hire you. There are going to be some people that don't care if you're virtual or in person, and then there are going to be other people who want you to be at their house, who want you to be doing those things.

So as long as it's clear out front which of those you are and how you work and why you work that way based on whatever those views are for you that are client-centered, obviously we're not saying, “Because I don't like to leave the house and be around people,” but I actually do think that in some cases, virtual allows the client to have a little bit of space from the stylist and integrate a lot more of the emotional aspects of the styling experience.

I actually do think that there are reasons why you can often go a little deeper because the client isn't distracted by you being in their house and like, I don't know, is the house a mess or is she going to judge me or is he going to judge me? All of that. It just doesn't happen.

And I also think from a stylist perspective, you could often have conversations that are more organically occurring in the process of a closet edit when you're at their house and you can learn things about them and you can pivot off of certain things that they say to get a level of depth that you would really have to structure your process for in a virtual styling experience.

But there are also people that just don't want you in their house and they are going to feel more comfortable in that experience by the fact that you're not there editing their closet. I get it from a stylist's perspective, you may prefer.

I actually think that, for example, shopping, it's so much faster when you're doing it in person because you're stuck with the limitations. Obviously, most of us fill in a shop that we did in person with an online pull for whatever we couldn't find, but that's a much smaller list than shopping for an entire season of clothes on the internet with all the options.

There are just pluses and minuses to both and we'll talk about process a little bit later on in boundaries, but that is a big part of what I consider to be a luxury experience, whether it's in person or online, is that when you think about what luxury is, it's really about creating an environment for the client that is comfortable, that attends to their needs, that is helpful in them feeling like they're being met where they are.

The actual definition of luxury is the state of great comfort and extravagant living. Then if you look at the definition of premium, which I think is even better for this conversation, is derived from the Latin word praemium, which is meant to mean a reward or a prize, a prized experience or an experience that's very rewarding. That's a premium experience.

I think that nothing in that says you have to be in person. Nothing in those definitions says anything about how that experience has to look, only how that experience has to feel, how it has to feel. It has to feel rewarding to the client. It has to feel comforting.

There's actually this great article in Forbes. It was actually published in December of 2021. The title of it was The Definition Of Luxury Is Expanding And Changing. It was a really great article. I really highly recommend you reading it. It says the three T's of luxury are now Time, Truth, and Trust.

Clients use their time right now in a digital age very differently than they did before. For some people, the fact that they don't even have to go into a store or that someone doesn't even have to come into their house is a way of experiencing an enormous amount of convenience, which is luxury.

This is why it's really critical to know who are my people and what is luxury to them. What is a luxury experience to them? I gave the example on a call recently to stylists of if you're a new mom and you're just feeling completely out of sorts, you've never had a kid before, this is your first time at this rodeo, that alone is one of the most identity altering experiences, especially in that beginning period of time when you bring a big home and you're like, “Oh, my God, what is happening? How did I get put in charge of this? What was I thinking? Oh, my gosh.”

Okay. Then your home, you've got like formula breast milk all over you, none of your clothes fit. That's a whole other world of why aren't people telling us, as someone who is a stylist, I had no idea how to dress for the months after I had a baby. I didn't know what size clothes I should have ready. I just couldn't figure that whole world out. There needs to be just a service that only handles that.

If you're out there and you want to do just postpartum, immediate postpartum capsule wardrobes for people, especially people that have had C-sections, you're going to be a billionaire, run with it. Please, take the idea and run with it. I would have given you all of my money. It was so overwhelming to not understand what the hell was going on.

Anyways, so you have that client. The fact that she can sit on her couch when the baby goes to bed, maybe drink a glass of wine, and look through the things that you picked out for her virtually versus worrying about the house is a mess, who's going to watch the baby, all of those things, when they're on maternity leave, the fact that she could hire a stylist to help her in that way and have that experience is a luxury to that person.

Now, if you have somebody who is a multiple six-figure, say entrepreneur, business owner, business person, and they have a lot of in-person help, they have a house manager, they have a nanny, they have a house cleaner that comes multiple times a week or multiple times a month, they have someone that cooks their food, yeah, they're probably going to want there because that's their idea of what that luxury is.

There are people that have those things and still don't want a stylist in their house. I think that when we think about the type of experience we are crafting, A, the fact that someone's even hiring a stylist to begin with 9 times out of 10 means it's already a luxury experience.

Then, hopefully, the stylist is giving them a sense of what comes next, a sense that their service was created for them. That's another part of this luxury, that you are giving somebody an experience that isn't just for anybody, it's created for them based on knowing the psychographics of your target demographic.

Your service has to be a reflection of that. A stylist that just has a closet added, a shop, and a styling session, and maybe they put them together in a package or whatever, maybe they're separate, and there's no context around that, why you do it the way you do it, how long it is, who it's best for, who you are best for as a stylist, without all of those things, you are going to get price shopped day in and day out and your marketing is not going to be interesting because everyone is saying the same thing, “Look good, feel good. Confidence, blah, blah, blah.”

Well, confidence for that new mom sitting on the couch drinking wine looking at the things you shopped for her and you explaining that to her in the notes section of your styling software, that's going to look real different than that multiple six-figure entrepreneur who's getting up on stages.

Their expectation from their clothes are different. Their expectation from the service is different and both can be luxury experiences. Another thing that can come up in this is that stylists will say, "Well, I don't charge XYZ amount, so I'm not really a luxury stylist or I only work with regular people."

First of all, do not say you work with regular people in your marketing. No one thinks they're regular. Everyone thinks they're special. You don't want to be called regular. I get what you're trying to say, but please don't say that in your marketing.

And, that doesn't mean that the experience still can't be a luxury. Because the truth is that what's a luxury price point for one person is a drop in the bucket to another person. There are people that spend more money on wine in a week than some stylists are charging for a season of service.

Again, you don't price your services for you, you price it for the target market that you are going to be in, and then you create the service to that market. Luxury in any market is having services and having a process that makes the client feel taken care of, whether they have to print their own return labels or not.

I hope that that was helpful. We're going to touch a bit more on that, some of those pieces of that answer in the third question. But the second question I want to dive into is how do you walk the line between deference to a client's wishes and showing your authority as a stylist?

What a great question, and also just what a great thing to think about as a way of handling life. Because if you just zoom out a little, it's a little bit hard when you're in the client relationship as a stylist. It can be hard when you feel like a client is pushing back against you and they’re somehow questioning your vision, your expertise, your taste, whatever, they're just questioning you. That's usually not how the client thinks of it.

This is true in any experience we have with another human being where we're not seeing eye to eye. I want to point out that it can be with your toddler, it can be with your spouse. I'm sure if you worked in an office, you had a boss or you had people around you that you didn't see eye to eye with too, but it can feel a little bit more emotionally triggering, I think as a stylist or a business owner when you're getting this feedback and it seems like the client is shutting down or they're not happy with you, or they don't like anything. It's so easy to make it about you when usually that's not exactly the story.

Either way, these are skills that I think are important in life experiences to remember we have, because if we remember it, it takes down some of the emotion that there are a million times in your life that you're going to have this experience with another human being that they are not seeing eye to eye with you and nothing has gone wrong and it's not a problem.

If you come at your professional interactions with clients from that standpoint, instead of being, "It's hard, it takes practice," and it really wasn't until I started doing more sales training that I started to see, "Oh, that's why these sorts of questions that I would ask clients in these moments worked versus others."

If you can just look at the client no matter what they're saying, good, bad, whatever, be just curious, like, “I wonder where that comes from. I wonder where that strong reaction to a purple shirt is, what could that be about?”

I think you have to just always hold this truth about being a personal stylist, is that clothes matter, and they absolutely don't matter at all. Because if you could hold those two things, your ability to be light and in the moment with your clients, and also to take things less personally, because you didn't design those clothes, maybe you picked them, but okay, you don't know everything there is to know about your client, so you don't always know where their feedback is coming from, which is why the idea of like, "I wonder where that's coming from" would be a good place to start when you want to be defensive.

You're just going to have to notice that coming up over and over. I think that's important to just prime yourself with that. Nothing has gone wrong and the way that you walk the line between deference to a client's wishes and showing your authority is in conversation.

It is in you not being rushed, it's in you creating an experience and an environment in your personal styling services where there is an expectation that you are partners, that you are in this together. You are on the same side of the table. You are not on opposite sides of the table.

You're not adversaries. You're not here to prove anything to them. You're here to give them what I like to call a language for the visual communication they want to provide to the world through their personal style. Your process is doing that.

When there is a misunderstanding or when there is a clash between the stylist's view and the client's view, it's not about who's winning, it's not about whose idea is right, it's about making sure—and this is something I've learned from my own coaches and the higher level mastermind work that I'm doing right now—is that whenever there is this tension in the client experience, you want to make sure that you are literally, if you're in person and metaphorically, if you're online or virtual or not in person, get on the same side of the table as them.

That's why answering texts when someone's upset versus getting on a phone call, always get on that phone call. That's why sending a voice memo over an email will always do better.

That's why picking up the phone and not putting it in an email when the person is heated, maybe not in that moment, but give everyone a second to calm down, but make sure that you address, “I hear you. I hear that you're not happy. I'd love to get on a call with you so we can talk about this.”

Tone of voice matters so much for helping them feel like you're on the same side of the table and not adversarial. What you want to do is create an environment where you are always expecting your client to tell you why they're thinking, saying, and picking what they're picking.

Not for any reason like you're going to correct them, but just because you need to know how these people think. So often, I see stylists who are afraid to have this back-and-forth with their clients when that is what people want from you. It’s so interesting how quickly we all have the tendency to like, “Well, I don't want to be--” it's not being confrontational to ask someone, “Hey, I'm noticing you don't like that. I'm noticing that your body language shifted. Could you share a little bit about why?”

Or “Oh, you don't like any of these shirts that I pulled for you?” Now that is like forever. I remember there was just a year in my career where I was like, "Why are all the shirts so ugly?" I still struggle with it. Like, what is going on with the shirts? What has happened to the shirts? There's either like half a shirt, there's too many ruffles on the shirts, there's like cutouts, what has happened to shirts? Have they always been this bad?

I didn't notice it for the years before I was a stylist or what, but man, I'm telling you, there were years where finding people jeans was easier than shirts, like for days, it was a nightmare.

I often would have polls where they didn't like any of the shirts. Like, “Girl, same, I get it, okay?” There's nothing worse than giving a client, whether they are looking at the clothes in person or you're presenting it online, there is nothing worse than the client being like, “I hate all of this.”

I have a pit in my stomach just thinking about it. I'm not even a stylist anymore. It is the best thing that's going to happen to you in your career because the better you get at this, by the time I close my business, I was like, “I live for those moments.”

Here's why. It makes you such a better stylist. The way that this is not a problem, this is one of my best tricks that I love sharing with stylists, is I set it up from the start for the clients to know they weren't going to like things and that was actually part of the process.

You have to be willing to be so confident in your expertise that not that you're perfect, or that you're going to figure, find everything right, or that you're never going to pull things the client doesn't like, but that you're confident in your ability as an expert not to be perfect, not to always be right, but to always figure it out, to always go back to the drawing board for the client, to always be in communication because that is where the tension gets resolved.

If you comment it from that standpoint, everything changes. When the client says to you, “Hey, I don't want to try that,” even though you know it would look great on them, or they only want the same type of style of dress, for example, that they've already had in their closet, and you're like, “Well, what's the point? That's not what this experience is about,” in those cases, the way to handle it is to be like, “It's okay for you to not like it. And in order to give you the best level of experience on this styling service, and for me to get to know you better, I just need you to try it. Because I need to know once you have it on your body, why you don't like it.”

Now, obviously, if they don't like pink, then that's fine. But I mean, there are examples of things where clients just will not try anything new. You don't even know that until you're in the process with them.

Then you either go at it that way or you say, “Listen, this isn't going to work. Let's get on the same page. Does it work for every single thing to be a no? Because you're not going to get the experience you want and I really want you to get that. Is there a way that we can look at this as we're just trying things, we're not wedded to anything?”

Once you start to get the client into that way of like, “We don't have to take the tags off, you don't have to go home with these things, you don't have to keep them forever, they're not stuck on your credit card. Can we have a little bit more play here?” The client will relax.

Even if they don't like something, they'll be more willing to try it on. But often, we don't understand how serious it is to the client because we don't know their history. We don't know if every time they got into a dressing room, they were in tears because their mom used to tell them they had terrible style when they were younger or whatever. I've heard all the things.

Because we don't know a lot of those things, because someone's not going to just come up and tell you that. I mean, they're hiring a stylist because they're struggling in this area or they just don't have the time or whatever. There's a struggle, whatever that struggle is, doesn't matter how deep it is, there's something there.

If that's the case, then they're going to come to this experience where they've made an investment of time and money a little bit serious. So that's why you're marketing, the way that you onboard a client, the way that you talk about your services, and the way you talk about style really matters because that's going to draw in the client that is not so intense and also educate the client that is intense that it's not that big of a deal.

Again, clothes matter, they don't matter at all. Holding that tension always is how you are a true expert in this field. They are just clothes and clothes can make a difference.

When I say to my clients, "Listen, you were successful without these clothes. You were a good person, a good wife, a good husband, a good leader before this experience. You'll be it after and the clothes are just helping your experience of yourself take it up a notch. That's all we're doing here. I know you have the story in your head about that you're just bad at style, but what if it's not that? What if it's that you haven't given yourself the time to play or the space to try things? Can we look at it like that?”

Then the client says yes, you want to get their buy-in. That's how you straddle the line between the client's wishes and your authority in conversation. Also, just as a life tip as a business owner, you train your clients in your marketing.

When stylists are like, “I don't know how to be original in my marketing,” I'm like, “You don't understand the opportunity you're throwing out.” Not only is it just not by having basic looks like everybody else kind of marketing as a stylist, putting up every story that you put up on Instagram is like links to something, if you're not identifying as a personal shopper, then you really shouldn't be doing that because every time you do that, you waste the opportunity to educate a person to either be your ideal client or to not be in your world.

Because people don't have the time in their life to think about style as deeply as we are. I mean, great news. That's why you're the expert. Now, help paint that picture to the person that wants to hire you and is really rigid in their thinking because they're so afraid of “getting it wrong.”

That alone is going to cut into and deal with the majority of this tension between being different to the client's wishes, which you always should be. But I think that what's behind this question is a little bit of like, “Do I give in? How much do I fight for what I believe versus the style that the client does?” That's not the way to look at it.

The way to look at it is like, “Maybe we just need to have more conversation. Maybe I just need to give them a little space.” You need to be able to read the room and you cannot read the room with a client if you're all in your head about “They don't like this and I'm bad and I'm terrible.” Even if they didn't think that, you'll go on.

I mean, we all have bad clients. We all have people that don't particularly probably think that we were worth it or that it was a good experience. Nobody wants that, but it's life. It doesn't mean anything about you and it doesn't mean anything about them.

The real way to handle that is to be in conversation, ask them to try things, and if they don't, you gotta go about your way. But always ask the client, “What makes you say that? Why are you not willing? What's going on here?” Get in their world and ask them why they don't like anything. It's possible that maybe they're a bit shut down or that they are feeling uncomfortable about this experience in some way and that's what you really need to talk about.

People respect that so much. Worry less about the clothes and their reaction to the clothes and get real curious about why that reaction is coming out. That is my answer to that.

Okay, question three. How do you set boundaries and expectation in a way that's warm and isn't off-putting to the client at the start of the styling engagement? Such a good question, obsessed with this.

You remember that boundaries and clear processes are a way of making the client feel safe. It goes back to that first question about creating a luxury experience, which is really about creating an environment, virtually or in person, whatever that looks like for you, where the client feels taken care of.

Again, as a stylist, it's so hard to sometimes get yourself on the other side of the experience, which is why as a business owner, it's so important to hire people in your business. It's important to hire graphic designers. I've hired interior designers and, oh, my gosh, I have hired so many people in my business over the past 15 years, but getting into the client side of the experience, particularly in a creative service, graphic design or I went to work with someone that did like hand-drawn animation or video or writers, like copywriters, being on the other side of that as the client will make you such a better stylist and such a better business person.

Because you all of a sudden see things in their process that you either like or don't like and you can adapt them to your styling business. And you remember that when you make a big investment, you really want to be told what's coming next. Because so many people come to the styling experience with a lot of head trash and poor experiences around style, clothes, dressing rooms, and beliefs handed down from families of origin in terms of what they should look like or how they should spend their [money]. There's just so much.

Because of that, it's really important that there be a lot of clarity and definition to the styling container and to the experience. It's important that they know that they are told multiple times how you communicate, how they should communicate with you, the speed of what you communicate, all of that is just being in integrity.

When you get that out of the way by just making all that clear in your onboarding process, it changes the game. It's also something you should be talking about in your marketing. Again, our marketing trains our clients to be our clients or to know that they're not for us, and that's all you should be doing in your marketing. That's it.

I'm telling you, it will change your whole life when you do that, and it's real hard to be like everybody else when that happens. When you are really just sort of laying out the client experience in your onboarding and also in your sales calls, you're going to have to repeat some of these things.

You're going to have to put multiple places, your communication terms or how many edits to a poll, online shopping poll that they get. You're going to just have to be really matter-of-fact about it and make it part of your process so that you are not even tempted to change it or they click, “Oh, I don't need to say this to this client.”

Everybody needs to know because 90% of clients have not worked with a stylist and if they have, they haven't worked with you, and every stylist is different. I can assure you of that even if you all have the same service, you're all doing closet, you're all going to do a closet at a different, you're all going to do a shop differently, you're all going to have a different set of expectations for how you deliver an online shop.

Are you going to do a call? Are you going to do a Loom? Are you just going to send it to them in an email? They need to know these things. They also need to know it because they need to know how much time this process is going to take so that they can be available and active contributors to the process because that is what they are.

You are a team. It actually isn't off-putting at all if you do it earlier, if it's part of the whole experience, as opposed to having to go back and correct things. That's when it can feel a little bit tricky. You know what? The way to handle that if it happens is to be like, “You know what? It's on me, I probably didn't communicate this right.”

“Hey, X, Y, Z. This is something that I wanted to bring up with you. I'm sure that I didn't communicate this properly, so let me take the opportunity to apologize for that and to lay the terms down,” whatever that is. I don't answer text messages. I never was comfortable with clients texting me on my phone unless it was the day of a shop, say we were going to meet in person. I'm not a fan of it.

I just think that it's a boundary I wasn't comfortable with. You'd have some good clients with that, they'd be fine, then you'd have the people that were texting you at 10 o'clock at night four months after their service is done, “Just one more thing, just one more thing.”

I don't even want to put that into anyone's head that that would be an option. Hopefully, no one does that, hopefully, they know but all it takes is one person. And are you texting your lawyer in the middle of the night? Are you texting your doctor in the middle of the night directly? No, absolutely not. That's ridiculous unless it's really out there and reason, like you just had major surgery and the doctor is on call for you.

But even then you're calling their cell phone for work, you're not giving them access. No real professional in any other field is like, “Oh, just text me all the time.” I get it, there are salespeople that do that, but again, they're on their work phones.

I just think that unless you're someone that's just incredibly, incredibly boundaried in that kind of situation where lines get blurred and people aren't able to cut off the ask for advice and all of that after the service is complete, most people are not great with those boundaries and it can make you uncomfortable.

For example, after I did that for a little while, I was like, just kidding. I would only let my clients use Voxer to contact me and then I would take it off my phone, not during work hours. Then I wasn't even tempted. I didn't even know what was going on in there.

Dude, Voxer me all night. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. I'm sleeping. But know that I'm just not going to answer it anymore when the interaction's over. That's all. So that is what I mean in terms of that's a situation with the texting, for example, where it's important that if you do let people text you, you say when you offboard them, and if you're not offboarding them, that's a whole other issue, but like, “Hey, now your tech support ends or in 30 days it ends.”

Then on day 30, they get an email that says, “It's over.” These are the things that make people feel, again, back to that luxury experience, I know it seems like often we think luxury experience in setting boundaries or having parameters around things don't go together, but I want you to rethink that.

You can't just like go into Chanel at any time unless you're probably like, I don't know, royalty or something and they're just going to open up for you in the middle of the night. It doesn't mean that the store isn't a luxury store, it means that that's not how it works.

So many times, I hear stylists telling me that they're burnt out and they're over giving and they're overdoing because they're providing a luxury experience when quite frankly, it overwhelms the client. It devalues you in their eyes because you're overly available.

Again, is your lawyer available 24/7? Is your doctor answering your direct texts when you have a cold? No, of course not. That's how you should be positioning yourself. You can do that with kindness and you can do that with grace and you do that by doing it before they even sign with you by making it clear, by having an FAQ on your website that you were repeatedly linking to, by having a sales call that they are prepped for in advance because you have put together something that tells them, "Hey, these are some frequently asked questions or here's an outline of how I work. I'm so excited to have a chat with you."

These are all things that are not off-putting at all. They are taking care of your clients and giving them an amazing experience. Thank you for being here for this little Q&A. I hope that these were helpful. These were some of the stickier client experiences I wanted to address and just some questions that I see a lot of stylists needing to do some thought work on in terms of just changing their own view of things like luxury, client experiences, boundaries, and being on the same team as the client even when they're giving you negative feedback.

These are all things that every stylist deals with. So if you've dealt with these and you've dealt with them in a different way, trust me, me too, that's how I know the better way to handle them because I did them wrong a million times in my career. Here I am, able to talk about it and able to laugh about a lot of it because I did some real stupid stuff, but you live and you learn. I hope this is helpful and I'll talk to you next time.