Styling & Inventory

"Operational" Vs "Insightful Reporting" for Creative Roles

We won't belabor the point; suffice to say that stylists need KPIs and reporting too! And not just the obvious productivity KPIs that support the studio - they need reports that help them do their jobs better. I would argue that those reports fall into two categories: operational and insightful.

Operational reports are more tactical, and not really tied to a KPI. These are reports that help a stylist run their department more easily and intelligently, reports that update the style teams with useful, on-the-ground information. These are reports that are more sample-focused, more about inventory availability, and more about giving a "heads-up" to something potentially needing urgent attention.

Here are a few examples of operational reports that a style lead might want to receive daily:

• Styling pieces

  currently loaned out

  While it might surprise some people, in my experience, stylists have a shockingly accurate knowledge of what is in their wardrobe for use. To that end, having a regular (daily or weekly) reminder of what they've loaned out to others is extremely valuable.
• Styling pieces scheduled to shoot

  that are not shoppable

  Most studios and brands want to leverage "shop the look," which means they want to use styling pieces that are currently available for purchase as well.

  A piece that is "not shoppable" would be an item that is sold out (or not available for sale for any other reason).

• Styling pieces on next week's shoot

  that are not in-studio

  As time to market decreases, this is less of an issue.

  Still, some brands create outfits weeks in advance of shooting. During this time, other teams may need the same styling piece and borrow it. When it comes time to shoot, having a styling piece that is not in-studio can cause problems for a style team.

Insightful reports are just that: they provide insight into performance. These aren't "red flag" reports saying, for example, that a sample is missing. These are reports telling a stylist about the work they're doing. In my experience, these are far less common reports - and not surprisingly, far more valuable. The reason these reports are more valuable is that they can be tied to KPIs and they can be tied to an employee's improvement. All of this is to say, these reports don't address one specific problem on one specific day - these reports contribute to continuous improvement and professional growth, which has a far greater value for a business in the long run. Sure, chasing missing styling samples is operationally important. But helping a style team grow sales and conversions across the board? I'd argue that is far more valuable.

Insightful Reports: Helping Creatives Achieve Their Goals

Here are a few examples of insightful reports that a style lead might want to receive weekly:

• Highest conversion of style pieces

  Styling teams would love to know if those new black boots they're styling with are making women's denim fly off the shelves! Conversion is notoriously difficult to track and ascribe reason to, especially for creatives. But if you have a tech stack in place that can easily provide data on not only conversion, but secondary products (styling pieces), you're positioned to unlock useful information for not only your brand, but your style team as well.

• Reshoot report

  Depending on your brand and market, reshoots may be unheard of - or extremely common. There are many reasons for reshoots, but in some verticals they are commonly for styling issues. It's often no one's fault, it just happens!

  How was the style team to know that these jeans were never intended to be paired with a high heeled shoe? Or that this technical jacket would never be worn with a base layer? Or, using home goods as an example, how was the team to know that they paired one company's couch with their arch-rival's lamp?

  Whatever the reason, no one wants a reshoot. At best it is duplicative work - and more likely, it is a financial loss.

• Most used style pieces

  Interestingly, this could be a positive or negative report.

  Your team may be aiming for variety, and may be dismayed to learn that one piece has been used over and over as a styling piece.

  Alternatively, if the goal is to push a specific product, even when it's used as a "shop-the-look" secondary piece, your team may be elated to see this report reflect the repeated usage of this product.

• Aging report of style pieces

  Aging reports are great for samples; they tell you how long something has been sitting in your inventory. This also applies to styling pieces!

  Your team may have a few evergreen pieces they don't mind having in the styling wardrobe, year over year (Nikes, Doc Martens, Levis, white t-shirts). However, the style team might be extremely happy to learn that 40% of their styling wardrobe is over 2 years old. Not only is it not shoppable, it might be even worse: out of fashion!

  Jokes aside, this report can help a team proactively request budget for new pieces, especially new pieces that are shoppable and will increase revenue!

There are plenty of KPIs that end up assigned to style teams, KPIs that support studio goals. We've covered these in previous chapters (things like productivity and accuracy). There are also useful types of reports that help style teams with their needs, specific needs which we've touched on in this chapter (operational, insightful reports). These are all important, but for my money, the holy grail of reporting for stylists is conversion.

This is a little antithetical, as creatives (supposedly) don't care about the commerce side of things. Following this (wrong) way of thinking, a stylist would be happy knowing that the outfits that they styled looked great, and they wouldn't care how they performed online.

Anyone who's worked in a studio knows this isn't true - they care! It's just that the tangible results of a creative's work, in this case, the conversion to a sale, is almost never shared with creatives. Put another way: in the absence of reporting, they have to embrace subjectivity. Imagine if you were a lawyer and you argued cases day in and day out, but never got to hear any verdicts. That is what a creative role experiences when separated from reporting.

The styling team, and their supporting sample teams, receive operational reports daily, that inform them of current statuses online and alert them to anything needing attention. The styling leads receive insightful reports weekly, keeping them up to date on trends, opportunities, goals and progress. And when imagery performs well, the style team, along with the rest of the studio, is celebrated for the quantifiable good work they've done.

Aging Reports: Unlikely Places for KPIs

Aging reports are useful for all kinds of things, though they are not usually thought of in terms of KPIs. An aging report, which tells you how long something has been “aging” (read: sitting around), is often used in terms of samples (how long have they been sitting around in the studio?) or in terms of tasks (how long have those images been sitting around waiting for selects to be made?). Usually, this kind of report is about efficiency, identifying bottlenecks, and even something as simple as keeping your styling closet clean and current. In the case of a Wardrobe Aging Report, you can do both - let's take a look.

First, let's look at a simple use case for this report (before we tie it to a KPI). Having a modern sample tracking system allows a report like this to be automatic, and it is super useful. Most stylists don't want pieces sitting around their styling wardrobe for years on end (I mean, all fashion comes back around, but let's keep things tidy). To this end, it is helpful having an aging report that simply tells you what samples in your wardrobe have been there for a set period of time (a day, a week, a year). Perhaps your goal is to purge the styling wardrobe once a quarter. You can pull an aging report from your sample tracking system, filtered to only include items that are older than 1 year, and include a column for location. Then, you can send your sample coordinators out to pull these for review and removal. Another approach would be to set up an alert so that any time that a sample over a certain age was scanned, it would alert the user.

So that's all well and good to use aging reports for keeping your styling wardrobe up to date - but what about KPIs? Most studios want to keep their styling current, with more and more brands ditching the old approach of seasonality and moving toward continuous product releases, or at least multiple drops per season. To support this, your studio and creative team may decide that they want all styling pieces to be relatively new. If you only shoot one brand, this may be easy enough ("hey - that's from last season!"). But most folks shoot multiple brands, including shoes, accessories, and cross-selling. And those items are harder to know the age of! So, perhaps a KPI is adopted to support this goal: Shoot only styling pieces that are less than one year old.

Advanced studio management platforms should be able to create a report for you that shows not only the hero product in an outfit, but each of the secondary products (styling pieces). Using this report, you can add in a Date Sample Created field, and then just see what percentage of styling pieces are under your one year limit - and which ones are older. Voila! A KPI showing you the percentage of success in styling with recent pieces only.