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Meet Emily McDonald of The Stylist LA

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily McDonald.

Emily, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
The Stylist LA is a designer dress rental company based in LA. Women can rent dresses in person in our showrooms in LA & SF and online where we ship nationwide.

I had the idea for The Stylist LA when I was a student at USC. I saw how often girls needed new dresses for every event, but they didn’t want to wear the same dress twice. With the importance of social media pictures, they were tired of borrowing dresses from friends that everyone had worn and they didn’t want to buy cheap dresses they would only wear once. I started The Stylist LA 8 years ago with a rolling rack of less than 30 dresses in my living room. This was before anyone was doing dress rentals so I wanted to see if the idea was viable before fully jumping in!

4 years later we opened our full-fledged showroom in Venice and invested in more inventory. This past fall we opened a pop up showroom in SF that was so successful, we decided to keep it a permanent location. Now we have thousands of dresses and tens of thousands of customers nationwide. I focus daily on offering our customers the best experience possible. The Stylist LA has so many exciting things ahead of it, and I’m so excited for what’s to come.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Hah! It’s never a smooth road when it comes to running your own company. My entrepreneur friends and I joke constantly about how it really is a roller coaster. One day you are on top of the world and the next day you are worried about paying bills, keeping customers and maintaining employees. There have been a lot of bumps, but I like to think of them as a part of the process. I tell all of our employees all the time, that bumps and mistakes are how we learn and get better. The struggles typically come when we are entering a new phase of growth, especially for me personally. I do think that when we are uncomfortable is when we grow, so I try and lean into the uncomfortableness and learn as much as I can. As far as The Stylist LA, bumps have been logistically (even still!) Dress rentals require a lot of moving parts that are very different than simply selling an item. The dresses are rented, have to come back to us and then be dry cleaned. We also have always struggled with maintaining excellent customer service as we grow. Ultimately to combat this, we listen to our customers, try and genuinely stay friends with our customer base and just do the best we can. There will always be bumps and struggles, I remind our employees that it is how we deal with those bumps that counts.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the The Stylist LA story. Tell us more about the business.
As I said, The Stylist LA is a designer dress rental company. Women can rent dresses from us in person in our showrooms or online. We have also recently started renting out more than dresses; rompers, two pieces, tops etc. We are known for offering a contemporary, current inventory of items for customers to rent from. We don’t keep items longer than a year and as soon as they start looking worn we get rid of them. We pride ourselves on having current inventory. We want our clients to look and feel their best and current, well-kept inventory is a huge part of that. Beyond that we are known for our customer service. We really want to be friends with our customers and make them as happy as possible. We make the dress rental process more of an experience rather than a transactional endeavor.

I am the most proud of how amazing our customer base is. We deal with the best clients who truly love what we do. Without this group of awesome women we would be nowhere. Our customer base has been so supportive of our growth and it has been so rewarding to take them on the process with us. I am also so proud of our team. Our girls have learned so much throughout our growth process and we have some of the most genuine, sweetest, intelligent women working for us. I am extremely proud of how far all of them have come and how much they have learned!

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Ahhh my favorite quote “You make your own luck.” I think luck is partially a mindset. I feel that we are VERY lucky, but that is also because I always look for luck and when something good happens I acknowledge the role that luck plays.

Pricing:

  • Our 5 day rentals range from $40-$85
  • It is $20 more for a 10 Day rental
  • Our Style Squad Subscription (unlimited rentals in LA & SF up to 3 pieces at a time) is $99 a month

Contact Info:


Image Credit:
Valorie Darling, Garrett Richardson, Taylor Cole

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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