If you’re anything like me, you’ve not had someone choose clothes for you since you were a child (more’s the pity). Unless you’re a celebrity with a personal stylist, you’re stuck doing it yourself. And if you’ve got a job and a busy social and home life, shopping for clothes can become less of a liberation and more of a burden.
I want to buy clothes. In fact I need to buy clothes. I wear them every day after all. But who wants to traipse around shops for a day spending time waiting in line for a changing room with a pile of potential purchases? Not me. I’m not lazy, I’m just busy.
Websites offer some respite, but by the time I’ve filtered by size, colour, fit etc, I’m presented with pages of almost identical items and get snow blindness.
Then I was introduced to Enclothed, a men’s fashion delivery service staffed by experienced stylists. Sign up online, detail your preferences, and they’ll pick a range of clothes for you and send them in the post. You only pay for what you keep, there’s no minimum spend and it’s not a subscription service; you just order a box whenever you want to add to your wardrobe.
After signing up, I spoke to one of the stylists about the sort of things I like, the items my wardrobe is lacking, my body shape, what I usually spend, and what clothes I need for work and any upcoming special occasions.
Perhaps most pertinently for me, as someone with a habit of buying similar clothes over and over again, was that the stylist also asked me about clothes I don’t tend to buy to establish whether my horizons could be broadened.
There’s a common phrase in IT: garbage in, garbage out. The same goes for Enclothed because you’re going to get much better results if you give the stylists more to go on. My box included a letter that told me about the items in the box and why they were chosen for me – with references to the conversation we’d had. It really made it feel like a personal stylist service, and it was nice to get a bit of background on the newer labels picked alongside the likes of Calvin Klein and Sunspel.
My very first @Enclothed delivery has arrived in the @coachmag office. Looking forward to trying it all on tonight pic.twitter.com/c1C6qJjv8iSeptember 2, 2016
The cost of the items will vary depending on what you tell Enclothed your typical budget is but my box had clothing ranging from £15 to £89 as well as some £120 shoes I loved (although they weren’t quite the right size so I sent them back). In the end I kept seven of the 14 pieces sent my way – I was surprised and pleased that they got so many right.
When I’d eventually settled on what was right for me it was just matter of taping the box back up with the rejected clothes in, printing out a new label and taking it to my nearest CollectPlus point (there’s also an option to arrange a free pick-up). The box even has a handle so taking it anywhere is easy.
Brilliant first set of clothes from @Enclothed. Now to return what I'm not keeping #deliveringyourstyle pic.twitter.com/YanYX4vKe9September 10, 2016
Enclothed customers tend to order roughly every three months and often keep more from each subsequent box because their tastes have become clearer to your stylist. In my experience, the system works and I look forward to seeing what’s in my box when I make my second order in the next quarter. I really can’t see myself wasting a day in a shopping centre anymore.
