Online Personal Stylists are the styling assistants who received a lot of attention after the pandemic hit. Are you planning to become one? Stick till the end to learn more about being virtual stylists and get started.
November 2019 noted that E-commerce sales raised to 4.4% a year while reaching up to 13.7% by 2021 due to the pandemic, a reason why there’s a shift from Fashion Styling/ Personal Styling to Online Personal Styling.
Fashion influencers around the world have also made buyers aware of the latest trends and styles, people are referring to virtual fashion stylists to curate a wardrobe of their choice.
Hence Online personal Stylists become the assistant you need who help you curate the wardrobe you want.
Who is an Online Personal Stylist?
The demand for Online Personal Stylists has been all-time high in the past few years. With social media becoming one of the new income sources, the need for looking good applies to one and all.
A virtual fashion stylist is a personal stylist who gives services online suggesting what to wear according to the given occasions, your body type, skin tones, and much more through social media or other online platforms.
While you have the freedom to shop anything from any part of the globe without even being present physically, you can be indecisive about what looks good on you and what are styles you need to collect to create a certain style or aesthetic.
The terms Personal Stylist, Image consultant, wardrobe stylist, and personal shopper, look similar professions while there, lies a vast difference.
“Outfit curation is an art and Virtual Fashion Stylist is everything that a personal stylist does online. They’re mostly based on consultations on Facetime or Zoom apps, in return get paid for their services.”
What does an Online Personal Stylist do?
Here is a list of services Online personal Stylists offer:
- Style assessment
- Mood board creation
- Evaluation of your wardrobe including accessories
- Orientation for a closet cleaning – if that’s the case
- Lifestyle assessment
- Set the image goals
- Silhouette proportions assessment
- Orientation about color combination, contrast, prints, etc.
- A suggestion of shopping – if necessary
- Creation of different outfits including existing and new clothes & accessories.
Related: Best Clothing Subscription Box and Styling services
What Skills Does an Online Personal Stylist Need?
Online Personal stylists or Virtual stylists have a set of skills that are required for you to be one.
Here is a list of a few skillsets that you need.
1. A Good Listener
A virtual fashion stylist must be open to listening to everything his/her client demands for. Patiently listening to your client will help you with a clearer vision of what they want and outfit curation becomes much easier.
In addition, the act of listening carefully makes the other person talk more, which helps you as a digital personal stylist as to the more you get to know them, the better your style!
2. Better Communication skills
One of the most important aspects of becoming a better personal stylist, offline or online has to be Good communication. While you set up a convenient environment for your client, you make sure it’s equally professional for a better experience on both ends.
Ask more, and make questionnaires to not fall short of details that you want to know before you guys get styling.
3. Proactive
Being proactive helps you with better connections with your clients. Your excitement about styling new clients also gets them a bit more involved in the whole process of building better relationships. That’s when your client will come back to you again and again.
4. Updated
Staying updated with trends is one of the key requirements you must possess as a virtual fashion stylist. Based on body types and skin tone, it helps in better style and color suggestions and you can dress up your clients in the trendiest way possible to stay relevant.
5. Immense knowledge of Body types
Knowledge of body types is immensely important when it comes to becoming a digital stylist, in fact, this skill is something you must be well prepared by heart before even you start dealing with clients as it’s required in any styling profession you choose.
Keep reading and updating yourself on various body types, the concerns, and how to implement trends into their everyday basics is a skill you need to achieve.
6. Client Focused
Don’t sell products because you might earn commissions, be consumer-driven, keep their requirements a top priority, keeping their budgets intact. They’re paying you for convenient apparel sourcing, the best fashion advice, and better choices of clothes. Make sure you’re able to build that.
7. A Business mindset and Marketing skills
An Online Personal Styling is no less than a business/freelance job as most stylists work full-fledged based on their personal branding. You need to have a business mindset on the vision of your brand, what values you preach, how to get more clients, and how to grow the business will be the crucial base of your work.
Pros and Cons of Becoming an Online Personal Stylist
Pros:
1. Time-Saving
Styling virtually helps to save time at both ends, be it the stylists or the client as it reduces the time and effort of traveling for consultation or even going out for shopping trials for that matter. Online styling consists of consultation through video calls and lookbooks that can be shopped via E-commerce sites!’
2. Comfort of home
Online Personal Styling allows you to work from the comfort of your home. Post-Pandemic has led to many work-from-home job opportunities, personal styling can also be done from anywhere as all you need is a laptop and good wifi!
3. Clients around the world
Virtual Styling gives you the freedom to serve clients from any part of the world. With everything going digital, connecting people from various is just a tap away. This gives you more opportunity to provide services to a wider audience, increasing your sources of income.
4.No Monotonous Job
Do you hate working 9-5 because it gets too monotonous sometimes? Well, with Virtual styling as your profession, you not only have the freedom to work from anywhere (location) with clients around the world, you have the freedom over your time too, it gives you absolute flexibility as a freelancer!
5. Freedom of working hours
You can pick as many projects and clients as a freelancing Online personal stylist with freedom of how much time you want to invest and what services you want to provide. Although while starting out, you will have to invest time and hard work to reach your ideal clients and get known, with experience you get more valued!
6. Easy to study your competitors
Since you can find every data online, you can easily research your competitors, their work style, packages, and the services they provide. This helps you to keep a tap on what’s happening in your industry, which might also help you upgrade your working patterns.
Cons:
1. You face problems as freshers
While starting out as a fresher Virtual Stylist, you might have to face a lot of hardships as getting your first clients to build a steady flow of income. In this case, Networking, Word of Mouth, and creating content on your social media platforms will really help.
2. Tough to get started
When you start out as a fresher online personal stylist, the first 6 months can be really daunting as it not only takes time to understand how the business works but finding trusting clients in the initial phase becomes challenging. This is when you need to be patient and keep working hard as most stylists quit at the initial phase.
3. Non-consistent job
As a freelancer, sometimes you would have multiple projects at the same time and sometimes none. It takes time to gain experience as a virtual stylist, to get the freedom of time, travel, and attending clients from any part of the country, you’ll have to work extra hours to get a clientele you can work all the time so that your job is not inconsistent.
4. Charging Packages
Quoting packages to your clients initially could look like a task as there are fewer testimonials of your work, building trust and justifying packages can stress you out, although you can always work on these drawbacks as they mostly stay in the initial stages of settling yourself as a freelance online stylist.
5. Cheaper rates/packages
In addition, while comparing prices with other fellow competitors, to keep your prices relevant to market prices, you might need to lower prices initially. Although it is advised to set fair charges for the packages you provide, you don’t need to lower your rates for clients!
How do Online Personal Stylists earn?
The national average salary for a Personal Stylist is $34,914 in the United States. Splitting it off, virtual stylists earn $50 to $200 per hour as per their experience and the list of services they offer to their clients.
Some even charge by the project as well: from $500 to $2,000 per day or project. Although initially, you might need to work for free but keep it till the time you feel you’re learning and gradually start setting up packages to provide your clients to make it easier on both ends.
What services to offer as a Virtual Personal Stylist?
Being an Online Personal Stylist needs to have a business and entrepreneurial mind to grow what you do, majorly, how to get clients and what to charge them. There are a wide variety of services you can provide as a Virtual Stylist, here are a few of them:
1. Closet Audit
A closet audit involves an analysis of the clients’ closets, finding pieces that they constantly wear and the ones they don’t. It also helps you understand a lot about your client’s personal style for the future.
2. Fashion Consultation
Providing a stylebook according to their personal style, help them create everyday looks from the garment pieces they already own. You advise them on the basis of body types, skin color, and the trends that suit them.
3. Closet Detox
Removing the clothes that you don’t need makes styling and creating looks much easier. It helps to remove clothes that don’t fit in the wardrobe anymore.
4. Event Styling
Sometimes clients approach you to get styled with respective to a few events that they want to dress up for. Depending on whether they choose to shop for stuff or style something from their closet, online personal stylists can always help them curate outfits and look how they want to.
5. Shopping
Online personal styling sessions do contain shopping as well. Initially, people booked sessions for accompanying shopping which is now replaced by shopping through websites and carrying the whole process online.
How to Promote your work as an Online Personal Stylist?
You can promote your fashion styling business through a few steps:
- Create a Website with your Portfolio of work and a clear mention of the services you provide.
- Create content around it on social media to let people know about your work, and make free advisory videos to add value to people’s lives.
- Sponsor your posts in the targetted location.
- Keep testimonials of clients who’ve worked with you so that other potential clients can be confident in you.
- Being vocal about your job is to get more traffic, word of mouth plays a huge role so make sure you’re 110% dedicated to your clients
How do Personal Stylists work with MUAH?
Online personal stylists, also called virtual stylists mostly specialize in their domain of styling where they do collaborate with makeup artists, and hair and skin specialists and sell these additional services through packages only if the client requires them.
With everything shifting online so soon, the pandemic did teach us a lot about how an online presence can help you get projects even if sitting at home and having a bunch of online skills can actually change your life for good.
Conclusion
Most stylists and Image consultants mention that it takes 6-8 months of constant effort and styling clients to get a consistent trusting set of clients.
These clients are not only regular people but you can also get associated with Tv shows, corporate offices, and celebrities depending on your domain of personal styling.
Promotions and marketing techniques on the other hand make the process a little bit easier by getting you recognition sooner if you use social media correctly.
Starting a Youtube Channel, and investing in paid campaigns for better reach and mini collations and partnerships also help you earn way more than you expect.
