Check Out Susie Coelho’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Susie Coelho.

Hi Susie, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My life has been one long act of reinvention.

Born in Sussex, England, of Indian parents. I grew up between Washington D.C. and Paris. New York, then LA.

I was always working. By my teens I’d already held several jobs: a sweatshop, the mall, a beauty counter, tea room modeling in Baltimore. I needed the money for clothes. Not just any clothes.
Fashion.

I dreamed about being on the cover of Vogue. My mom enrolled me in a beauty pageant (I wasn’t the beauty pageant type, actually) but I won Miss Photogenic, the photographer took my picture to a New York agent, and the next thing I know I was moving.

Even though I landed with the prestigious Ford Models, it was three months before I got my first job, hitting the streets, leather portfolio in hand, platform boots to look taller. My first job? Three pages in the New York Times. For Air India.

Not exactly what I had in mind! Then came Vogue. I was sure this was my big break. The shots ended up in the back pages of the shopping section, only an inch and a half tall. My boots were taller!
I made my way to LA thinking that would be easier and that my ethnicity wouldn’t be a barrier. Boy, was I wrong!

Soon after I arrived in LA, I met Sonny Bono. Yes, Cher’s ex-husband! We married, opened restaurants in Hollywood and Houston, and were chased by the paparazzi all over Hollywood.
Later I threw a garage sale that turned into a business. I opened A Star Is Worn on Melrose: celebrity clothing, Cher, Travolta, Farrah Fawcett, luxury resale before the category existed. Who knew years later I’d get my own star?

Then came a multimedia lifestyle company: four books, two HGTV series, brand partnerships with some of the world’s biggest brands. And from that, an idea I couldn’t shake for eighteen years.

StyleSeekr.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Building it was another story entirely.

Here I go again.

I asked ChatGPT what the first thing I needed to do was. It said to meet with a development team. So I got one on the phone.

The first thing they said was that I needed an MVP. I thought, really? Why can’t I be the most valuable player? They laughed. Minimum Viable Product.

Yikes.

This didn’t seem to be going well.

Then he said it’s always important in the tech world to stay flexible so you can “pivot” and change direction. Darn! I thought. I’m not that flexible. I can barely touch my own toes. Should I tell him now? But boy, I’m good at pivoting, even in six-inch heels! Then we started talking about investors, and he said they would want to know what my burn rate was. Well, I replied, I know a lot about burn rate from my shopping habits. Even though I was a five-time founder, I suddenly felt like a first-day intern. Everyone has to start somewhere.

The real challenge with StyleSeekr is that I’m building something that has never existed before, in an industry I’ve never worked in, while also trying to explain why it needs to exist, all at the same time. I love a challenge, and I was determined to create this new category.

We’re only getting started. We have over 20,000 members from all over the globe and growing every single day. Creatives in Lagos are being discovered by brands in New York. Stylists in Manila are connecting with production houses in London. The problem was real. The timing’s right.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
StyleSeekr is the company I’m most proud of. Creatives need visibility.

Brands and individuals need to find them.

StyleSeekr solves both. It’s a global marketplace for creative talent powered by Style DNA, a system we built that matches brands and creatives by aesthetic, not follower count, not who you happen to know. We have over 20,000 members from 50+ countries and growing by hundreds of users every single day. For the first time in my life, I’m not ahead of the curve.

I’m right on it. The global creator economy is expected to double in the next year. The timing is finally mine.

The idea came from living both sides of the problem for forty-five years. I understood creative identity from the inside. Brands were paying for my network, my aesthetic, my eye, and the fit between my world and theirs. But it’s impossible to scale a personal brand past a certain point, and I thought I’d crossed that point multiple times.

Every time someone needed a photographer, a stylist, a videographer, they called me. Everyone called me when they needed someone. And ironically, I was having enough trouble finding people myself, both personally and to hire for my company.

If I couldn’t find people, how could anyone else?

The threads were always there, I just couldn’t see them at the time. I won a prize in Paris for connecting people across cultures. Years later I built a global platform that does exactly that. I hand-painted stars on my store floor. Years later I got my own on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars. I used to paste my photo on magazine covers as a teenager just to see what it would look like. Years later I was on covers. I never planned any of it. I just kept following the thread.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
I was seventeen. It was the 1970s. I was determined to be the first kid in my high school to buy her own car.

By that point I’d already had several jobs. My mother got me a job working at a friend’s clothing warehouse one summer for $1.60 an hour. It was basically a sweatshop, even though nobody used that word at the time. I needed the money. I was keen on buying my own car as soon as I turned 16.
Senior year I decided I was buying a car. I only needed math and English to graduate, so I took those in the morning and worked the rest of the day. Saved what I had and drove off in a used white Camaro with black racing stripes, convertible top. I was the first kid in my high school to buy her own car.
The National Institutes of Health was right down the street. I figured if I could type over 75 words a minute (honestly one of the only practical skills I picked up in school), maybe I could get a job there. They would pay better than anyone else.

I landed the job and was so excited. Every day I’d pull up in my white Camaro with black racing stripes, convertible, get out wearing hot pants and white over-the-knee vinyl boots, and strut into the government like I owned the place. Nobody seemed to care.

After some months of working there, they told me they would like to send me for computer training. I remember asking, “What’s a computer?” Turns out I trained on the MT/ST machine that IBM had just released to the government, one of the first computers in the world. And I was one of the first women in the world to train on it. Who knew that would be my first foray into tech?!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.styleseekr.com and https://www.susiecoelho.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/susiecoelhoofficial
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susiecoelho
• Other: https://vimeo.com/1179721777

Image Credits
Vogue Photo: Vogue Mexico

IMG 1196: Viktoria Sirakova

IMG 1237: Viktoria Sirakova

Susie at FIDM: Ivan Cadwallader-Martinez