How to Send a Client a Digital Lookbook

Worth saying up front: this is published by Stylement, which sells software to stylists. There is a clearly labeled section near the end about where it fits. Everything before that is what I would tell you over coffee, and most of it costs nothing to act on.

If you are working out how to send a client a digital lookbook, the mechanics are the easy part. Export, attach, send. You can be done in four minutes.

The part nobody warns you about is what happens next. She opens it on her phone in the school pickup line, says something lovely, and then it goes wherever attachments go. Three weeks later she is standing in a shop with no idea whether the jacket in front of her is one you picked.

So the real question is not how to send it. It is which delivery method leaves the lookbook somewhere she can find it at the moment she needs it.

The four ways stylists actually send them

1. The PDF attachment

Still the most common, and it is not a stupid choice. It works offline, it looks the way you designed it, and everyone knows what to do with it. The costs are real though. Attachments over about ten megabytes bounce or get stripped, and a lookbook full of photographs gets there quickly. You cannot change a single price or swap one sold-out item without sending a whole new file, which means version two lands in her inbox under version one and she opens the wrong one. And you have no idea whether she looked at it.

2. The Canva link

A step up, and the one most stylists graduate to. The link is light, you can update the design in place, and Canva is genuinely good at making a page look expensive. Where it starts to hurt is everything after the design. Every lookbook starts from scratch or from a duplicate, the shopping links are manual, and the file has no idea what is already in her closet. It also puts somebody else in the URL, which is fine, until you notice it does not say your name.

3. A lookbook or catalog tool

Flipsnack, Issuu and the rest will give you a page-turning digital catalog and they do it well. Worth understanding what they were built for: a brand publishing one catalog to thousands of people. You are doing the opposite, publishing one lookbook to one person, and then another to the next person, forty times a season. The page-flip is lovely and the economics are backwards.

4. A client portal

A page of her own that she logs into, where the lookbook sits alongside her closet and everything else you have sent. This is where the work has been heading for a few years. The honest tradeoff is that it is a bigger commitment. You are asking a client to visit a place, and that only pays off if there is a reason to come back.

The test a lookbook has to pass

Whichever method you pick, judge it against four things. I got to these by noticing which lookbooks clients mentioned six months later and which ones they never referred to again.

• She can find it in ten seconds, without searching her email. If finding it is work, it does not get found.
• She can act on it where she is standing. That usually means the items are shoppable from the page, on a phone, without you in the loop.
• You can change it after you send it. Prices move and things sell out, and a lookbook that cannot be corrected starts being wrong the day after it lands.
• It has your name on it. Not the name of the tool you made it in.

An email attachment passes the fourth and fails the first three. That is the whole problem in one line.

On making it shoppable

Shoppable is the word everyone reaches for and it needs a caveat. A lookbook where every image is a link is more useful, and it is also one step from reading as a sales sheet. The version that works is the one where the shopping is available and not the point: the outfit is the idea, and the link is there for the moment she decides she wants it.

If you use affiliate links, say so on the page. Clients do not mind, they mind finding out later. One plain line at the bottom is enough.

What actually goes in it

Most lookbooks are too long. Ten to fifteen looks is plenty, and a shorter one gets read all the way through, which a thirty-look document never does. Beyond the outfits themselves, the things clients come back and thank me for are these:

• What she already owns, marked as such. The single fastest way to make a lookbook feel like it was made for her.
• The reason for each look, in one sentence. Not styling theory. Where she would wear it and why it works on her.
• Sizes and fit notes where you know them, especially across brands that run differently.
• What to buy first if she only buys one thing. Almost nobody buys the whole lookbook, and telling her the order is a kindness.

Where Stylement fits, clearly labeled

This is the part where I am selling something, so weigh it accordingly. Stylement is a studio platform for personal stylists, and the lookbook side of it exists because of the four-part test above.

• The lookbook lives on a page in her own studio, under your name and your colors, so there is no attachment to find and no other company on the URL.
• It is built from her actual closet, so pieces she already owns can sit next to new suggestions and be labeled as hers.
• It is shoppable, and you can edit it after you have sent it when something sells out.
• It sits beside her closet, her trips and her past lookbooks, which is the reason to come back that a portal needs in order to be worth it.

Plans are $49 a month for Starter, $129 for Pro and $399 for the Atelier studio tier, published on the site so you can read them before you talk to anyone. There is also an honest comparison of the stylist platforms, including where the others beat us.

The fair caveat: if you send four lookbooks a year, a good Canva template will serve you better than a subscription will. This is priced for a practice sending them every week.

If you change one thing

Stop sending attachments and start sending a link, whatever tool the link points at. It is the change that costs the least and fixes the most, because everything else on the list becomes possible once the lookbook lives at an address instead of in an inbox.