Boohoo’s budding young stylist Kate Holroyd answers KU’s questions on styling, her role and your future.
Holly Wilson
Miss Holroyd is a stylist at Boohoo.com, a leading online UK fashion store that now ships worldwide. It is Kate’s job to coordinate the fashion shoots for most of Boohoo’s campaigns, spending her 9-5 day unlike most other graduates her age.
The 21-year-old describes why this is her ideal job saying: “It’s so exciting getting to see all of the up and coming trends before anyone else, and getting exclusive looks at the new boohoo clothes.”
Perserverance and determination
On a typical day she picks all of the outfits she feels inspired by or drawn towards and advises make up artists on how they should make her models look. They often shoot up to 45 outfits a day, all including a catwalk runway.
Miss Holroyd explains that she got the job through perseverance and determination. After completing her fashion foundation at Manchester Met she began working as a sample co-coordinator in the Boohoo fashion studio. After 18 months of hard work assisting on shoots she had enough experience to apply for the stylist position which she was offered.
“Massive buzz”
The highlight of her career so far was styling her first creative shoot. She said: “Having spent the best part of two years just assisting on shoots, it felt like such an achievement and such a massive buzz to walk away with really beautiful, successful images like the ones I’d envisaged.”
Her advice to students is: “you need a great deal of persistence to get noticed. Don’t just don’t give up and keep applying for jobs, placements, and opportunities within those jobs once you secure them. Remember to make a good impression, as you will stick in people’s minds as being either really hard working, and therefore good or really bad.
“No in-betweens! If you really impress on the first occasion, say a styling shoot or editorial piece, or even just organizing the fashion cupboard or helping pull a rail, you could get contacted to help out the following time!”