Shaye Strager Talks COVID and Fashion with ROAD

Shaye Strager talks to us about how COVID has impacted her life, her business, and her family.

How has COVID impacted you and your dreams? Record your story to let us know!

Transcript:

None of us could have ever imagined us being hit by a pandemic of this large scale. What a tragedy this pandemic has been for the amount of lives lost, but in some ways I kind of feel like there has been a reset, Never before in my adult life, have I had such a massive reset and a refocus in time. So much time to think about what really matters to me, both in my job and in my real, you know, in my life outside of work.

Like many folks at home, you know, I had someone working on every level of our home. I was working upstairs. I had my husband and his office and I had my daughter homeschooling in the dining room. 

All of us suffered in some way, but especially my business did. Luckily I had a lot of people at the same time doing the same thing, you know, of my 33 executives that I work with, I would say about 88% of those are women. So I have a lot of clients that were going through the same thing I was. And, you know, I do have a lot of CEO's that don't have children, but they still were dealing with so much in their own work environments that we didn't, we weren't having a massive rush for styling.

Especially through COVID, there was a big light bulb moment for me that really helped me actually actually transition my career from what was a very demanding in person building styling service to something now that is almost all virtual. And I think that, you know, the one beautiful thing about styling and image consulting is the fact that we are talking about how you are perceived by your image. And we know now that we've all transitioned to this zoom and WebEx and these different online video platforms, we've actually been able to still control our image, but the screen is smaller. So the parameters are smaller. So as soon as I started thinking about, you know, how can I survive this? How can I transition my business so I don't lose clients, but I can still be very helpful to them? I created this webinar that talks about professional styling for video communications. And within a month I had sold that webinar 12 times. And I was asked by huge corporations to do it for their companies, for their staffs, for their clients.

The pandemic has absolutely opened other doors and channels of work that I never thought that could be huge revenue streams for me. And I'm grateful for that, you know, for every challenge that leads to an open door that can help us expand our business. It certainly has helped in my case.