Twenty-one years. Four industry awards. Fifteen thousand vetted creators.
Styling Concepts has run fashion, beauty and lifestyle communications from Johannesburg since 2005, with a second studio in Cape Town through Press Room since 2016. Four industry awards, more than thirty brands, and a vetted creator network of over fifteen thousand people.
I founded it and I still own it. The difference now is that I am involved at the level of strategy and senior counsel rather than day to day, which is what twenty-one years buys you.
Johannesburg · Since 2005
Styling Concepts is a fashion, beauty and lifestyle public relations agency in Johannesburg, South Africa, founded in 2005 by Lorraine Maisel-Forbes and operating a second studio in Cape Town through its sister agency Press Room since 2016. Its services are public relations and media relations, influencer strategy and creator management, and event and experience curation, supported by a vetted network of more than 15,000 South African creators. It has worked with more than thirty international and local brands including H&M, L'Oréal, Kérastase, The North Face, Tommy Hilfiger, Converse, Red Bull and Pandora. It won a Bronze PRISM Award for Influencer Management in 2021 and was named PR Agency of the Year in the South Africa Prestige Awards in both 2020/21 and 2021/22. It can be contacted on 082 440 2249 or at info@stylingconcepts.co.za.
Earned coverage across print, digital and broadcast, built on relationships held for two decades rather than on a bought media list. Launch and collection publicity, press material, media kits, and the unglamorous follow-up that decides whether a story runs.
Reporting is against a commercial objective agreed at the start. Column centimetres are easy to generate and mean very little on their own.
What the relationships actually buy you is timing and benefit of the doubt. An editor who knows the agency will open the mail, will say no quickly when it is a no, and will occasionally hold a page. None of that can be bought in a media list, and all of it decides whether a launch lands in the same week as the stock does.
The network runs from nano creators with a thousand followers to national names above a million. Size is the least interesting thing about it. What makes it worth having is that we have worked with these people, know which of them deliver on a deadline, and know which have already posted for your competitor this quarter.
Selection starts with your customer rather than with the creator list. We define who needs reaching, then filter on audience demographics, genuine engagement, category credibility, brand safety and existing partnerships, and only then look at the content itself. That last step is the one most plans skip. It is also the discipline the PRISM judges gave us a Bronze for in 2021.
Creators can apply to the network at any time. Send your handle, your city, your categories and your rates to the studio, and you will hear back whether or not there is a live brief that fits. The network is vetted rather than open, so applications are read individually.
Store openings, product launches, media previews and VIP activations, taken from concept through to the coverage that follows. In March 2024 the studio relaunched at Media Mill Park in Milpark with activations for the L'Oréal-group brands La Roche-Posay and Lancôme, which is a fair sample of the format.
An event is a content production with guests, and the brands that get value from ours treat it that way. We plan the assets, the seating and the running order around what has to be published afterwards, then invite the people who will publish it. Guest list, run sheet, press pack and follow-up all sit with the same team, which is why the coverage arrives while the story is still current.
The recognition below came from the South African and pan-African communications industry rather than from us, which is the only reason it is worth listing.
The person who takes the brief is the person who stays on the brief. Nobody is handed down to a junior account executive the week after the pitch.
We agree at the start what the campaign is supposed to move, and we report against that rather than against a clipping count.
If an event is the wrong instrument for your launch, we will say so and tell you what would work better for the same money. Twenty-one years of goodwill in this industry is worth considerably more to us than one badly spent retainer.
We do not run paid media, we are not a performance marketing agency, and we do not take briefs where the objective is volume of coverage rather than effect. There are agencies who service those briefs well and we would rather name one than take work we cannot be proud of.
Tell us what you are launching and when. You will get a straight read on whether PR is the right instrument for it.