The Fashion Brand Clinic Podcast

Is a stylist a luxury or a business expense? My own stylist has an answer, and a number that settles it.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Stiles, host of this podcast, and this one's a bit personal. Sophia Bayly is my stylist — she has been since the early days of her business, back when I'd come out of lockdown living in gym leggings and could not have told you what my wardrobe was any more. Which, for someone who has worked in fashion her entire career, is slightly embarrassing to admit.
I know what some of you are already thinking, because I thought it too: a stylist is expensive, it's frivolous, I'll do it when I'm making more money. So I put that to Sophia directly. Her answer reframed the whole thing for me — and it came with a stat that made my jaw drop.
Sophia is a personal stylist for women in business: founders, the women building personal brands online, the ones who have built something successful, are suddenly being invited onto panels and podcasts and into rooms, and have looked in the wardrobe and realised it hasn't kept up with them. She's worked with over 80 of them, on both sides of the Atlantic. And because we're mates, this is less of an interview and more two friends being very honest about clothes and money.
What we get into:
The reframe: why Sophia stopped calling styling a personal treat and started calling it a business investment — and why clients say yes faster when she does

The 120-day stat. The mental tax of getting dressed — nothing to wear, stressing about the event — costs the average woman 120 days of her life. Hand that load to someone else and use it for making money

Cost per wear: the £10-a-wear dress versus the £40 dress you never touch, and why Sophia's clients say the process has saved them money

If you outsource your podcast editing, why wouldn't you outsource your style?

The real cost of not doing it: the client who skipped a really important networking event because she couldn't face deciding what to wear, and the one who couldn't think straight on a panel because she felt wrong in her clothes

People don't discover you through your website any more. They discover you on social media. Your style is doing the talking before you've said a word

Style is tribal: how what you wear signals "I'm for you" to the right customers

The client whose leads changed depending on what she wore

Why every single one of you already has a personal style, even if you're convinced you don't

Client A vs Client B — the safe, neutral, Uniqlo dresser and the colour-and-pattern magpie, and what each wardrobe is missing (this is the bit to screenshot)

Why "I've got nothing to wear" is almost never true, and buying deep instead of diverse

For the brand owners: the two brands nailing styling content — Never Fully Dressed and Tibi — and why it's Sophia's number one answer to "how do I keep selling after launch week"

The advice she gives every client: where are your shoes? A top and trousers is only 50% of the outfit

And the line I needed to hear: black Birkenstocks and a Uniqlo swing bag will kill any outfit. Dead.

 
 
Find Sophia
Instagram: @sophia.a.bayly

TikTok: @sophia.a.bayly

Website, style quiz and free downloads: sophiaabayly.com

Newsletter: Off the Cuff — weekly styling tips, sign up via her site

Mentioned in this episode
Never Fully Dressed — founder Lucy Aylen · neverfullydressed.com · Lucy was a guest on The Fashion Feed, episode 58

Tibi — founder Amy Smilovic, New York · tibi.com · her weekly Instagram Style Class

Odd Muse — founder Aimee Smale · oddmuse.co.uk

The Shopping Forecast — Elizabeth's other podcast, with Catherine Erdly (where the Shark ChillPill review will be settled once and for all)

Work with Elizabeth
Magnetic — the six-month marketing accelerator for fashion brands. Styling content, storytelling, all of it, so your clothes keep selling long after launch week. → https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/marketing-waitlist

Fashion Marketing Live 2027 — Monday 15 March 2027, London. 100 fashion founders in a room. The first one sold out in a day — waitlist via the menu at elizabethstiles.co.uk

The Scaling Project — six months of 1:1 mentoring for established, VAT-registered brands → elizabethstiles.co.uk/level-up

Free resources → elizabethstiles.co.uk/freebies

The Fashion Feed — the free weekly newsletter and Facebook group

The Saturdays and S Club Juniors superstar Frankie Bridge and Leah Meredith built Faves out of something that started as a weekly post — Frankie trying on high street finds on her landing every Sunday. It's now a community-powered platform working with River Island, ASOS and Katie Loxton, running live events and a newsletter that out-engages everything they do on social.
This one is about the unglamorous machinery underneath a business everyone assumes was easy because there's a famous name attached to it. Spoiler: it wasn't, and the famous name has occasionally made it harder.
What Frankie and Leah get into:
The Instagram DM Leah ignored because she assumed it was a fan account — and the year it then took Frankie to believe Faves was actually a business

Why the newsletter came before anything else, and Elizabeth's blunt view on brands sitting on six figures of Instagram followers and a five-figure email list

The difference between a customer and a community, and how to tell which one you've actually got

Why what you say no to matters more than what you say yes to — including the big-money offers they turned down when they badly needed the money

The front row decision at Faves The Runway, why PR pushed back, and what it bought them

How to know your customer for real: the WhatsApp group of Faves Insiders who'll tell them straight when something's overpriced

Why 30 engaged people in a room is a genuine win, not a disappointing turnout

What actually happens when brands hand over creative control — and why those are the collaborations that perform

Frankie on being back at the bottom: starting again in fashion after S Club Juniors and The Saturdays, and being read as a pop star having a go

Why in-person is the one thing AI can't touch, and what that means for how you sell clothes

Elizabeth's line of the episode: "You don't need to be a bitch to work in fashion."
If you've been telling yourself you need a bigger audience before you can do anything real, this is the episode that takes that excuse away.
Find Faves
Instagram: @favestheedit

TikTok: @favestheedit

Frankie Bridge: @frankiebridge on Instagram · @frankiebridge on TikTok

Faves newsletter: 
https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/subscribe?a=QWEBkN&g=TNYEpL&utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

Leah Meredith:

https://www.instagram.com/leahmmeredith/

https://www.instagram.com/haus_of_hyde

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/hausofhyde

Mentioned in this episode
F&F at Tesco — Frankie's first clothing collaboration, and how she and Leah met

River Island, ASOS and Katie Loxton — named as the brands who backed Faves early and gave them creative control. The Faves Edit with Katie Loxton is live

Faves The Runway — their London Fashion Week show. Faves Live events on Eventbrite

Lauren Paxton — Faves stylist · Izzy Utterson — head of wellness contributor [spellings to confirm]

FEBE Growth 100 — Frankie and Leah are listed as co-founders of Faves on the 2026 list

Work with Elizabeth
Magnetic — the six-month group marketing programme for fashion brands. 25 places a round → https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/marketing-waitlist

The Scaling Project — six months of 1:1 mentoring for established, VAT-registered brands → elizabethstiles.co.uk/level-up
The Starter Course — four sessions for anyone at the very beginning → elizabethstiles.co.uk/services

The Fashion Feed — the free weekly newsletter and Facebook group

Free resources → elizabethstiles.co.uk/freebies

They chased one brand for eighteen months. It's now their bestseller. Here's what finally made it say yes — and what makes a buyer quietly drop you.
 
Alyssa Iaquinto and Lily Quenneville barely knew each other when they decided to open a shop together. Three years on, ROVE London sits at 333 Portobello Road, stocking Dôen, Simkhai, Posse, St. Agni, Tressé and a rotating cast of brands you genuinely cannot buy anywhere else in the UK.
 
But this isn't really an episode about opening a shop.
 
Alyssa and Lily are buyers. They are the person on the other end of the wholesale email you've been sending. And in this conversation they say out loud the things brands almost never get to hear: why they say yes, why they say no, what makes them drop a brand, and exactly what a late delivery does to a boutique's margin.
 
What we get into:
 
• The chicken-and-egg problem of stocking a brand-new boutique — and the one brand that said yes first and unlocked all the others • Why Dôen took eighteen months of follow-ups, and why that's actually a compliment • The real reason brands said no: no trading history, no website, not a single social post • The thing they'd genuinely go back and change, which is the same regret I hear from founders constantly • What actually happens on a buying trip — the 6am Eurostar, three days of back-to-back appointments, and why two buyers in the same showroom walk out with completely different edits • How the data/intuition split shifted from 100/0 to 50/50, and why their numbers never tell the whole story • What to do when you get a buy badly wrong and nobody wants the thing you bought fifteen of • The screenshot bit: what makes a brand a joy to work with, and what makes one a nightmare. Spoiler — it isn't the design or the price • A dress due in January that landed in July, and what that does to a selling window • Why they turned down a street full of big names to sit among independents and vintage shops instead
 
Alyssa and Lily are also both inside Magnetic, so I get to watch them do this properly week to week.
 
The bit I keep coming back to: they answer customer WhatsApps at midnight. One of them took a customer's call on the Tube. You can never get that on Amazon — so do what Amazon can't.
 
FIND ROVE LONDON Shop: 333 Portobello Road, London W10 5SA Online: https://rove-london.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rove_london/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rove_london
 
BRANDS MENTIONED Dôen · Simkhai · Tressé · Posse · St. Agni · Staud · Faithfull the Brand · Agolde · Soft Goat · Le Scarf. Also name-checked as customer requests: SIR. and DISSH.
 
WORK WITH ELIZABETH Magnetic — my six-month marketing accelerator for fashion businesses. We build an organic marketing strategy from scratch and then put it into action together. Fully booked for 2026!  Join the waitlist for 2027 here > https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/marketing-waitlist
 
 
The Scaling Project — six months of 1:1 mentoring for established, VAT-registered brands https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/level-up
 
Free resources: https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/freebies
 
The Fashion Feed — my free weekly newsletter and Facebook group
 
Fashion Marketing Live 2027 — Monday 15 March 2027. The first one sold out in 24 hours, so get on the waitlist via the menu at https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk
 
The Shopping Forecast — my other podcast, with Catherine Erdly:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-shopping-forecast/id6787894258

Your personality is the one thing no competitor can copy. So why is everyone still copying each other?
 
Sophie Milham grew Odd Muse from 90K to 500K on TikTok and from just under 100K to 900K on Instagram — in two and a half years, straight out of a fashion styling degree, having never studied marketing in her life. She then became the very first hire at electrolyte brand SULT, who launched into Boots with a waitlist built before the product even existed.
 
So when Sophie says stop chasing the algorithm, it's worth putting your phone down and listening.
 
This one comes straight from the stage at Fashion Marketing Live, Elizabeth's sold-out event for fashion brand founders, and it is a proper masterclass in the thing most brands are still getting backwards: personality beats polish, every single time.
 
What Sophie covers:
 
The three places your brand's personality actually lives — founder-led content, employee-generated content (EGC), and personal branding — and how to pick the one that suits you

Why LinkedIn is the most untapped platform in fashion right now, and what to post on it that isn't boring

Storytelling over aesthetic: why the perfectly curated grid has had its day, and the 80/20 split Sophie uses instead

How SULT built a waitlist of buyers before there was a website, a product, or a single sample

The £100 giveaway stunt that put half a million people onto SULT before Sophie's first day

Why the month the Boots launch went wrong got the best engagement of the year

Your social media is your CV — and the pitch deck Sophie replaced with a list of Reels links

The "what's in, what's out" rundown you'll want to screenshot

Plus a genuinely brilliant Q&A on luxury pricing, messy content, and whether to keep your personal and brand accounts separate

 
If you have ever spent your 9-to-5 scrolling for research and your 5-to-9 doom scrolling for "inspiration", this episode is your permission slip to stop.
 
"People buy from people. They don't just buy a product."
 
 
 
Find Sophie
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sophie-milham-1636221b9

Instagram: @sophiemilhamx

TikTok: @sophiemilhamx

Mentioned in this episode
SULT — drinksult.com · founders Milly Goldsmith & Henry Porpora · in Boots

Odd Muse London — oddmuse.co.uk · founder Aimee Smale · @oddmuselondon

Capala Swim — capalaswim.com · @capalaswim

PerfectTed and Surreal — brands she says are doing employee LinkedIn content properly!

Work with Elizabeth
Magnetic — the six-month marketing accelerator for fashion brands. 25 places per round, weekly coaching, full training hub, monthly planning and the templates. → Fully booked for 2026!  Join the waitlist for 2027 here > https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/marketing-waitlist

The Scaling Project — six months of 1:1 mentoring for established, VAT-registered brands → elizabethstiles.co.uk/level-up

Free resources → elizabethstiles.co.uk/freebies

The Fashion Feed — the free weekly newsletter and Facebook group

Fashion Marketing Live 2027 — Monday 15 March 2027. The first one sold out in 24 hours, so get on the waitlist via the menu at elizabethstiles.co.uk

Hosting my own live event was hands-down the most terrifying thing I've ever done in business. Six months before Fashion Marketing Live — the UK's first fashion marketing conference — I was kicking and screaming about the whole idea. Then it sold out in 24 hours. This episode is that talk, recorded live in the room.
If your marketing feels like shouting into an empty room, this one's for you. I break down the formula I believe builds a fashion brand people are genuinely obsessed with: Leadership + Message + Community. No fluff — just the three things I will not shut up about, and why they matter more in 2026 than ever.
In this episode:
Why the word "leader" makes you squirm — and why a following is impossible without stepping into it

The reason only 12% of women build a six-figure business, and how we start shifting that

What Debenhams and Topshop teach us about losing a community (and how to avoid it)

Why Nike arguably has more believers than a political party — and what that means for you

Getting your message clear enough that other people sell you through word of mouth

Meet "Brenda": the inner-critic voice talking you out of being bold

Why trust beats perfection every time — the Victoria Beckham lesson

I'm also joined by one of my absolute icons — reality-TV star, real-life superyacht captain and author of Be the Calm or Be the Storm, Captain Sandy Yawn — who recorded a message on leadership that genuinely made me well up.
Also mentioned: Gemma Collins, Andrew & Pete, Daniel Priestley's Oversubscribed, Patagonia, Lucy & Yak, Gymshark, HunsNet, and the Business of Fashion's "companies are the new communities."
Links & next steps:
Join The Fashion Feed — free weekly newsletter & community: https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk

Fashion Marketing Live 2027 is on 15 March 2027 (last one sold out in a day) — Fully booked for 2026!  Join the waitlist for 2027 here > https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/marketing-waitlist

Work with Elizabeth (Starter Course · Magnetic · The Scaling Project): https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/services

Captain Sandy Yawn: https://www.captainsandyyawn.com · Book: Be the Calm or Be the Storm