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From Paris Haute Couture extravaganzas to style advice from Sara Parker Bowles, these fashion insiders cater to every sartorial whim
Got the cash to splash but not the time to spend? Our expert meets the elite personal shoppers on hand to cater to a client’s every need.
It’s fitting that I should meet Luminaire’s Sukeena Rao on the dance floor at a party, hosted by Greek couture designer Celia Kritharioti, at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. This is the world of Rao’s clients and she is immersed in it. A personal shopper with more than two decades’ experience, ranging from the shop floor at Armani in Manchester (where David Beckham first became her client), via Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Liberty (Liv Tyler and Kate Moss came to rely on her and still do to this day), to in-house consultancy stints at luxury labels. Rao now heads her own personal shopping company Luminaire with fellow founders Harriet Quick, a former British Vogue journalist, and Olivia Scanlon, a New York-based financier who, like Rao, originally hails from Manchester.
The company tagline, ‘The future of shopping is personal’, is one that the team came up with six years ago: ‘Just before Covid, Harriet and I were figuring out how shopping and editorial could work together,’ explains Rao (the Luminaire website is an elegant showcase of the founders’ taste and cultural chops). With a background in law and investment banking, Scanlon is the commercial brainbox.
Luminaire, which opened for business in 2022, essentially operates as a subscribers’ club. For a one-off £5,000 fee and a £5,000 annual subscription, members have access to a personal shopper and unlock various services (including access to ‘whispered about experts, whether that be an aesthetician or a meditation guru, an interior designer or maker,’ as Quick puts it).
‘We always had this core belief in VICs [Very Important Customers] and the value of this very ultra-high-net-worth, high-spending client… That was the rationale for our business,’ says Rao. There have been, however, upheavals in the world of shopping recently with the demise of Matches Fashion and problems at Farfetch. These mean that, as Scanlon points out, ‘everybody really is desperate to attach themselves to this very important influential client segment.’ ‘But we’ve been doing it for 20 years!’ adds Rao.
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The process of joining Luminaire starts with a survey, where new members share their tastes and key information about themselves such as their most treasured items and most hard-working pieces. This is followed by a consultation with Rao or one of the team of senior stylists. (The average annual spend per client is approximately £50,000, but some drop many times that amount.) ‘We’re under the skin of people,’ says Rao. ‘I know what schools their children go to; I know people’s music tastes. I know, for example, that one client loves Alphonso mangoes, so when I pass them in an organic greengrocer, I’ll buy 16 boxes and send them. It’s a small thing, but the devil really is in the details.’
Seeking out and sourcing whatever the clients want from anywhere in the world is the Luminaire mission, whether it’s fashion, fine art, jewellery or couture. ‘Even down to gifting,’ says Rao, ‘which is a division that’s taken off for us in a huge way, particularly in LA.’ That also includes, according to Quick, an editorial spotlight on ‘interiors, escapes and creatives – fashion does not exist in a silo but is intimately connected with bigger shifts in lifestyle and taste’. The aim, she adds, is ‘buy less, buy better and we hope to make that experience a delight’.
Continuing on this thread, Rao says, ‘We show people some of the outfits that they could wear for certain events, and we’ve made a real point of using dresses that the clients already own.’ She pauses. ‘Of course, you could run and get every single thing brand new. That’s fabulous if someone wants to do that, but it’s not the direction we want to go in and it’s not good taste.’
The demand for Luminaire’s services is such that they’ve recently launched higher tiers of membership. ‘There are some people that actually want to deal with us on a weekly basis and want to plan their weeks, whether it’s gifting, fashion, jewellery,’ says Rao. ‘So we have a £25,000 premium membership which gives clients full access to all our experts and services.’ That means working alongside a client’s personal assistant. ‘We are another arm,’ explains Rao
So what is changing for the Luminaire customer? Can they give me an insight? ‘People are spending a lot more,’ says Rao, citing couture as being particularly strong. Back in January, Luminaire curated a Paris Haute Couture experience for their younger clients (under 30), resulting in more than £800,000 in sales over three days. Ways of working vary between the fashion houses, so Luminaire streamlines the service, attending and arranging all fittings and taking note of the feedback from brand and client. ‘People are willing to invest in a beautiful, long-term outfit that they think they’re going to wear for ever,’ says Rao.
And the most coveted labels for the season ahead? ‘It’s all about Chloé, it’s already coming through into the shops and it feels great,’ says Rao. ‘And The Row is evergreen – just look at the frenzy for the Margaux [the label’s impossible-to-find handbag].’ Quick, who has just returned from Paris to see the fall/winter haute couture collections, tips Khaite’s leather pieces, particularly its Bordeaux-hued trenches, and trophy embellished denim. ‘We love Undercover’s gold-fringed jeans and Schiaparelli’s trompe l’oeil corset jackets,’ she adds.
Now with a staff of 12, Luminaire will be making a push into the US market this autumn, hoping to expand its celebrity division and build the client base in Los Angeles, as well as opening up a dedicated Luminaire office in New York. The company website, meanwhile, is getting an upgrade, featuring more articles and shoppable fashion and beauty that non-subscribers will also be able to access. Visitors to the website can click to buy some of the products; other items will require users to register their interest. ‘Invariably, given the nature of the products and everything we’ve chosen, if we have chosen correctly, it’s super-hot,’ says Rao. ‘So you know, sometimes it’s there. And sometimes it’s not.’
luminaireco.com
‘The idea came from something that I knew was missing for me: I was struck by how many of my friends and colleagues were complaining about having nothing to wear, even though I knew they had healthy wardrobes,’ says former fashion journalist Sara Parker Bowles. ‘We can all relate to those tantrum tears when nothing is working. Everyone blames themselves, “It’s me, it’s my body shape.” I wanted to turn it around and ask why your wardrobe is not working for you.’
She set up her styling consultancy business Wardrobe Revivals in 2022. Her modus operandi is to reboot a client’s over-stuffed and jaded closet by editing, decluttering and organising it into ‘pillars’ – for instance, work, holiday, events – based on their specific lifestyle, then introducing super-targeted shopping to plug the gaps. It sounds as personal as it is practical. ‘It is quite intense. Face to face… lay it all out on the bed,’ says Parker Bowles. ‘It’s quite a powerful thing to let someone into your wardrobe, when you are not feeling your best. It always takes about four hours and we basically talk through every single piece of clothing.’
She explains that there is often an emotional trigger or a dramatic life change that prompts her clients to seek out her services and they can find the whole experience therapeutic, as can Parker Bowles. ‘I don’t think I’d be enjoying this as much if it wasn’t for the human element,’ she admits. The fee for the initial consultation is £500, with follow-up shopping trips (both real and virtual) priced at £100 an hour, with no minimum spend required.
One of Wardrobe Revivals’ clients is Miriam Goddard, a former joint active underwriter at Lloyd’s and now a non-executive director at another Lloyd’s managing agency. Approaching her 60th birthday and easing herself into semi-retirement after decades in a high-octane City job, she approached Parker Bowles with a conundrum. As someone who had ‘always enjoyed buying clothes’, Goddard’s repeat-buy uniform consisted of St John suiting and Roger Vivier heels – both perfectly chic, but weighted with associations of a life stage she was about to exit.
Much decluttering later, she and Parker Bowles went shopping to source some cool, modern pieces to bring a new versatility (and a certain west London nonchalance) to Goddard’s strict sartorial repertoire. That translates into ‘modern little vest sweaters’ from Margaret Howell, along with some new lighter knits from the men’s section of John Smedley. ‘And that is something I would never have done,’ admits Goddard, ‘nor would I have gone into Margaret Howell.’
Mary Nightingale, the ITV Evening News presenter, is another Wardrobe Revivals client. She describes Parker Bowles as being ‘like the cool girl at school, whose style everyone would aspire to. But the key is she’s really kind, too, totally approachable and fun.’ In particular, Nightingale enjoyed the follow-up package of ‘inspo pics’ and shopping suggestions sent by Parker Bowles (‘I’m not a fashion dweller,’ admits Nightingale, ‘so it was all quite revolutionary to me’), with links to game-changer pieces, with high, mid and low price points. ‘So you could look at an amazing La Perla silk chemise to go under a jacket, see the price and think, “Christ, no way!” Then she would find something else that was really lovely from Intimissimi instead.’
A complementary website Wrapp10 has also been recently launched, offering digital styling and personal-shopping appointments with a roster of stylists to appeal to different demographics, style tribes and wallet sizes. Among the names on hand to assist with the launch are former Harper’s Bazaar stylist Florrie Thomas and sustainability-minded content creator Kelly Eastwood (@thelondonchatter). Parker Bowles’s Wrapp10 partner, meanwhile, is Lucy Baxter, founder of Coldharbour Digital, the agency responsible for building the original Wardrobe Revivals site.
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Over the phone, Baxter gives me the lowdown on other services Wrapp10 will be offering. These include a machine-learning opt-in for shoppers happy to receive prompts and recommendations based on their behaviours and preferences, as well as luxury reseller Hardly Ever Worn It (HEWI), an official partner, so that clients can shed old pieces they no longer wear. ‘We essentially want to create a style hub platform that takes care of everything,’ explains Baxter. Prices for the different Wrapp10 services will be tiered according to each stylist, with the price for ‘Wrapp Occasion’ to put together an outfit for a specific event starting from £45, depending on the level of stylist selected.
The one-off special occasion consultation that Parker Bowles currently offers at Wardrobe Revivals is £100 per hour (in person or virtual). A snip you might say to tap into her ‘cool best friend’ taste, secure in the knowledge that she has navigated just about every dress code known to womankind (she started her career as a PA to former British Vogue editor Alex Shulman, and was formerly married to Queen Camilla’s eldest son, Tom Parker Bowles, the food writer).
How does she steer clients through the pitfalls of dressing for a big event? ‘I tell people not to make a massive departure from their usual style and resort to fancy dress, like people do at Christmas,’ explains Parker Bowles. She also asks her clients to show her the invitation, to divine clues about the ‘context of the room’, and ‘how you can bend things slightly’.
And what about her own preferences? ‘I always love Prada, The Row, Sacai – and I’m still a sucker for old “Phoebe Philo” Céline,’ she replies. For formal occasions, she often starts from the shoes up. ‘For the King’s Coronation, I bought some red Manolos,’ says Parker Bowles. ‘I don’t normally wear red shoes, but I thought this is going to be my little flourish and then I’m going to pare down everything else.
‘It is the most satisfying thing when you feel your best,’ she continues. ‘It’s enormously empowering. It’s hard to learn, but it can be done and it should be accessible for everyone.’
wardroberevivals.com; wrapp10.com
‘Personal shoppers and sales associates have so much power, so much influence,’ says Lupe Puerta, a dynamic Spaniard, who arrives to meet me by Lime bike, wearing an Adriana Iglesias suit in a similarly verdant hue. ‘Personal shoppers drive at least 15 per cent of global luxury sales, and this figure continues to grow.’
A veteran personal shopper, with stints at Vivienne Westwood, Harrods and Selfridges under her stylish belt, Puerta was also ‘employee Number 47’ at Net-a-Porter, where as global director of VIP client relations she was instrumental in building the website’s invite-only EIP (Extremely Important People) programme.
Six years ago, Puerta began dreaming about setting up a new tech-driven business that could harness the superstar power of shop-floor assistants across the luxury industry. ‘Clients find the personal shopper who really has their back and knows their lifestyle, their style biases, their everything,’ she explains. Then, of course, the pandemic struck, and with stores shuttered, sales staff started leaving their jobs and taking their valuable contact books with them.
‘I guess it accelerated the dream,’ says Puerta, who launched The Floorr in January this year. This smart digital platform enables personal shoppers to communicate with their clients, curating recommendations, mood boards, even daily outfitting from a global inventory of millions of products – ‘so that the conversation never ends,’ as Puerta succinctly puts it. To date, she has raised around £1.4 million to develop her enterprise. The venture is also backed by fabled investor Carmen Busquets, part of the powerhouse team that launched Net-a-Porter with Natalie Massenet.
According to Puerta, the luxury e-commerce experience is changing. ‘Customers are going back to personal shoppers,’ she notes. ‘There is so much out there, it’s hard for the customer to shop. It’s kind of a contradiction because they should be able to get their hands on everything, but at the same time it is a huge effort. Personal shoppers are like brokers now.’
She flips open her laptop to whip together a mood board for me as her client for the purpose of this piece, and it’s immediately easy to see the appeal for a customer. The sleek collages that Puerta pings over look like shopping pages from an upscale glossy, except these are specifically tailored to my taste.
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There are currently around 200 global personal shoppers using The Floorr, including London-based Samantha Simpson, a personal shopper with 15 years’ experience and an early adopter. ‘I trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York,’ she tells me over the phone from her holiday in Montauk, Long Island, New York. ‘Everyone else was going after being in bricks and mortar, but I’ve always been really passionate about doing things digitally.’
Guastella meets most of her clients through word-of-mouth recommendation, but you can find her on Instagram (@imstyledbysam). Her page showcases her world of lust-list items from Hermès and Chanel in hard-to-find hues and fabrics; a caption reads ‘nothing is out of reach, please get in touch with absolutely anything you may be searching for’. She tailors her services to clients’ individual needs, and fees are charged accordingly. ‘I have clients for whom I have completely digitised their wardrobes and I’m telling them what to wear every single day – for them it’s a monthly retainer.’
The Floorr facilitates an elite army of personal shoppers like Guastella to set their own fee structures with their clients, taking pre-agreed commission off the transactions made on the platform, which are not passed on to the customers. The Floorr is designed to help them manage their own businesses as ‘Personal Shopper Entrepreneurs’, or PSEs as the company acronym goes. What’s different for clients is that they are typically invited to join the service by their shopper. ‘One PSE in New York has just signed up 49 clients,’ Puerta tells me. ‘Although we have seen clients downloading the app and requesting their PSEs to serve them via the app.’
So what are The Floorr customers searching for this season? ‘Loewe, Prada… they are still very relevant. We know that these brands are going to be really important in the fall,’ says Puerta. She also sees ‘quiet luxury’ continuing to hold sway from brands such as Brunello Cucinelli, Fforme, Loro Piana, Toteme and Khaite.
And what about big-night dressing? ‘We are still in a post-Covid era where people are definitely excited to dress again,’ says Guastella. ‘People all want a bit of outfitting, to feel like their whole ensemble is special.’ Miu Miu, Alaïa and Loewe are her three most requested brands at present, but what would she suggest for a more below-the-radar option? ‘Magda Butrym is definitely my go-to,’ she says. ‘Anytime, anywhere I wear it, I get the most compliments.’
The irresistible allure of the authentic, personal recommendation; the insight that no algorithm can reach. That’s what The Floorr is about, says Puerta. The stylists ‘really are about finding the cool new brands. I wouldn’t say they’re so label obsessed,’ she says, with a smile. ‘Unless their customer is.’
thefloorr.com
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