Seven ways of working. One person doing the work.
Seven ways of working, one person doing the work. Engagements run from a single strategic session through to a retained advisory relationship, and I keep the number of them deliberately small.
What is common to all seven is the starting point. I want to know what the business is actually trying to achieve, what it has already tried, and what everyone involved is too close to see. The recommendation follows from that, and sometimes the recommendation is that you do not need me.
Johannesburg · Since 2005
Lorraine Maisel-Forbes provides brand and creative consulting to fashion, beauty, lifestyle and retail businesses in South Africa. Her consulting covers seven areas: brand creative consulting, fashion styling and visual direction, brand positioning and ideas, mentoring and advisory work, special projects and collaborations, retail consulting, and public relations and communications counsel. Engagements range from a single strategic session to a retained advisory relationship, and are delivered by Lorraine personally rather than by an account team. She is based in Johannesburg and works with brands across South Africa. She has worked in fashion, beauty and retail for more than forty years and founded the Johannesburg PR agency Styling Concepts in 2005.
The creative direction of a brand, taken as a whole rather than campaign by campaign. What it looks like, what it sounds like, what it is allowed to do and what it should never do again. This is usually where a brand has grown by accretion, has six versions of itself running at once, and needs one person to decide which of them is the real one.
Output is a direction a team can actually execute against, not a mood board. If your in-house team or your agency cannot build from it, it has failed.
Styling is where I started and it is still the discipline I am fastest at. Campaign and editorial direction, shoot concepts, casting, wardrobe, and the judgement calls on set that decide whether an expensive day produces usable assets or a folder nobody opens. I work on individual shoots and on the visual system a brand runs across a season, which is the more valuable of the two and the one most often skipped.
Where a brand sits in its market, who it is for, and the single idea it can own. Most positioning work fails because it produces a statement nobody outside the room can repeat. The test I apply is whether a junior in your business can explain the brand to a stranger in one sentence without looking it up. This is the work I am most often brought in for, and it is frequently the cheapest thing a brand can buy relative to what it saves them in wasted campaign spend afterwards.
Founders, marketing leads and creatives who are good at what they do and have nobody senior to talk to about it. Regular sessions, an agreed agenda, and a person who has already made most of the mistakes available in this industry. Some of this is strategic and some of it is simply having somewhere to test a decision before you commit money to it. Both are legitimate uses of the time. I have also sat on the other side of it, and the value was never the answer I was given. It was that somebody senior had heard the whole problem and did not flinch.
Brand partnerships, capsule collections, cross-category collaborations and one-off projects that do not fit anybody's standard scope. These are usually the most interesting briefs I get and the hardest to price, so they are quoted individually.
I have spent four decades accumulating the network these projects depend on, and in practice that network is most of what I bring to them.
Range, buying strategy, in-store experience and the relationship between what a retailer buys and how it then talks about it. I was a buyer, so this is not consulting from the outside. I know what it costs to commit to a range a year out and be wrong about it. Useful to independent retailers scaling up, and to brands trying to understand why the retailers they want are not taking them. The answer to that second question is almost never the product. It is usually the margin structure, the delivery record or a range plan that asks a buyer to take a risk nobody has given them room to take.
Communications counsel drawn from twenty-one years of running an agency: whether you need PR at all, what it should be doing, how to brief it, and how to tell whether the agency you already have is any good. Advisory rather than delivery.
If the answer is that you need the work done rather than advised on, Styling Concepts still runs full fashion and beauty PR programmes and that side of the business is unchanged.
Anything from a single half-day session through to a retainer running across a season. Positioning and creative direction work is usually a defined project of four to eight weeks. Mentoring and advisory work is normally monthly and open-ended. Special projects are quoted individually because no two of them are alike.
Yes. I am based in Johannesburg and I work with brands across South Africa, and Cape Town work runs through Press Room where a physical presence is needed. Most consulting sessions happen remotely and the ones that matter happen in person.
An honest account of what has already been tried and what it produced, whatever numbers exist, and access to the person who can actually make the decision. Work that has to be filtered through somebody who was not in the room tends not to survive contact with the business.
No. Styling Concepts is a PR agency and it delivers campaigns with a team. Consulting is me personally, advising, and it is charged and scoped differently. Some clients use both and some use one for years without ever needing the other.
Tell me which of the seven is closest to what you need, or describe the problem and I will tell you. The first conversation costs nothing and is usually short.