Styling Your Customer: A Guide for Retail Associates
“We are credible, fashionable stylists with a commitment to our styling resources.”
Defining This:
Style: a distinct appearance, typically determined by the principals according to which something is designed — the way you translate fashion into your personal wardrobe
Fashion: a popular trend, especially in style of dress and ornamentation, or by manner of style
Personal Stylist: helps clients achieve their desired looks (or style) by aiding them in the selection of personal style items, such as clothes and shoes.
Styling Tips:
1. Know the different body types and how to dress them! What looks good on some may not work for your client. Help them dress for their body and their proportions.
2. Understand the brand’s sizing in relation to other popular brands your client may shop with.
3. Understand that, wrong or right, you can compliment and encourage, but you cannot change someone’s body image.
4. Try, try, try! There is no easier way to know the product than to try it on!
5. Understand how the brand fits, and how material compositions can alter this.
6. Don’t be afraid to educate the customer on the fit or the cut of the product and how that can work for or against them.
7. Never lie to a customer and tell them something looks good when it doesn’t. Suggest alternatives. We are here for the customer, without them we don’t have a job.
8. Follow fashion bloggers, designers and magazines on Instagram and other social media outlets, they are a wealth of information and represent what will soon be in stores!
9. When shopping, never be afraid to enter a store. See how you can relate a store’s style to your own, to ours, and to your clients.
10. Style Challenges. Style Challenges. Style Challenges. Continuously push your associates/stylists to be able to style for any event, body type, weather or other need.
Body Types:
Questions for Consideration:
1. What is your body type?
2. Where do you shop? Why do you gravitate to those retailers or brands?
3. What is your favorite item of clothing and why?
4. What would be the business benefit to being honest with customers?
5. Styling can significantly increase DPT/ADS and UPT. Why do you think this is?
