Why shopping with a personal stylist brings joy and makes sense

The first time I heard about the difference between shopping as a browser or shopping as a hunter I was sitting in church. The speaker was trying to highlight the difference between men and women and encouraging men to not be so task focused.

Since then I have been exposed to the concept of shopping personalities through my wife’s work in providing people shopping services.

Putting aside the differences in men and women, all of us at times have the need to be task oriented in our shopping, “I really need a particular outfit for a specific occasion”. The opposite is also true and many an hour has been whiled away browsing through racks of something or other.

The time spent in physical shopping has been reported as being therapeutically beneficial. Shopping can lift mood through the anticipation of reward. This anticipation releases dopamine, the happy hormone.

With the advent of social media and influencer shopping the time spent wandering through shops has moved to online browsing. At any moment a person finding a few minutes of downtime or needing a lift can turn to the internet and scroll and browse all sorts of suggestions.

The problem with this is the immense amount of choice and explosion of possibilities leading to a condition introduced by Alvin Toffler called over choice. This over-choice creates anxiety and can undo all the benefits of therapeutic shopping.

Through sartorialbliss Katie offers personalised shopping. The shopping can be with you in person or pre-shopping (finding out where you should go before your shopping trip) or online shopping.

The design of these shopping services is structured to make the most of both browsing or therapeutic shopping as well as hunting shopping.
When shopping with a stylist, there is an increase in the happy shopping emotions. This happiness comes from shopping with someone that knows where to go, which has the amazing benefit of being able to find the best deals. This is really important in the shopping game played between store owners and shoppers. There is nothing quite like knowing that you have got an amazing item of clothing for a fraction of the cost.

Another huge benefit is the ability to ask advice. Asking advice from an expert that is focused on you is fantastic because you know that the advice you get is not biased by their own preferences. When you ask “does this look good?” You know that all elements are being considered in that answer. Your attributes, your personality style, colour, fit style and trends come together to give you honest really informative feedback that you can trust.