THE DREAM MERCHANTS

Sophie Hill cut her teeth in retail on the British high street. Today she tracks down the most expensive designer must-haves via social media for young women across the world. Apparently, no request is too tricky.

Next time you text your partner to ask them to pick up supper on the way home, spare a thought for Sophie Hill’s sourcing team, who take orders over WhatsApp (as well as Instagram private message and WeChat), not for pasta and milk, but for $250,000 Hermes speedboats and $1 million diamond earrings.

Hill, 40, is the woman behind the world’s quickest and most direct personal shopping service, Threads Styling, which conducts its business over social media and instant messaging the way the rest of us might discuss the last episode of Happy Valley. You may worry about neglecting the group banter, but the Threads Styling team is managing more than 13 million chats on WhatsApp.

Hill cut her teeth on the buying and merchandising teams at Topshop during its Noughties heyday and has applied that company’s flair for administering the latest youth-culture cool fix to an emerging bracket of big spenders. The clients on her books are at the youngest end of the international jet set: high net worth individuals, either millennials or Gen Z, with cash to burn and better things to do than spend it in person.

“I opened the service without a generation in mind,” Hill tells me when we meet at what she jokingly calls her local, the Nobu Hotel on Portman Square in central London. She is dressed, to use fashionspeak, in “designer casual”–an Isabel Marant jumper plus smart (nonclingy) black leather trousers–and frosted with sparkling stacking rings and multiple diamond ear piercings that glister success in a way that is both subtle and noticeably cool.

The Demographic Demand

Hill’s Gen Z/millennial age bracket (roughly 11 to 42 years old) numbers more than 4 billion people globally and makes up some 55 per cent of the world’s population. They are set to account for 65 per cent of luxury shoppers by 2025. Anybody not mindful of how and where this demographic is spending its money is, therefore, missing a trick.

“We were young, so we were attracting our peers,” she continues. “And nobody was catering to these people. A CEO of a really big fashion retailer was like, ‘Why are you wasting your time? They haven’t got any money.’ The minute they said that, I thought, ‘Right, we’re not going to focus on anyone else.” She was right not to. These shoppers average £2,500£3,000 per shopping basket, requesting over text message items such as £725 Loewe jeans, £930 Amina Muaddi heels and Bottega Veneta’s all but sold-out £860 enamel-drop earrings, and then paying through a link sent to their chosen chat app. Forty per cent of sales are shipped to the Middle East and Asia. Last September, the Dubai-based Chalhoub luxury group bought a majority stake in the business–all its shares but for the ones owned by Sophie Hill–reportedly for an undisclosed sum.

Connecting the Dots

Threads Styling isn’t a shop: it holds no stock but exists to swiftly facilitate its users’ wish lists, in much the same way that Uber connects travellers with drivers and arranges the financials. The team recently tracked down the only pair of vintage desert boots in a client’s size from the archive of an Italian museum. They have sourced and sent fine-milled sand in bulk to a client who needed it for a party, kitted out a bespoke gaming room and designed several elite doll’s house interiors. Hill says they are increasingly moving into art.

Has anyone been in touch about the lion dress, I ask with reference to the one-shouldered Schiaparelli gown, complete with life-size brooch of a (fake) big cat head, worn by Kylie Jenner at the label’s couture show in January. It is very much a “price on request” piece, thought to cost more than £50,000.

Hill’s diplomatic response suggests her team is fielding as many requests as there are the real deal wandering around Longleat. “We send our team to couture week so they’re more likely the ones having that conversation. These are shoppers whose parents picked one couture house and stuck with it for 30 years. People now are looking for tastemakers to help them decide.”

Sportswear signed by famous players; Lady Gaga’s keyboard; a genuine Marvel Batman suit–all at the drop of a text, because this is how those under 40 prefer to communicate. The company’s mission was inspired by the influx of tourism– and fashion fans–from China that Hill witnessed while at Topshop.

“These luxury customers didn’t have a place where they could partner with a personal shopper, so we worked with Claridge’s and customers began to find us through our blog.”

Raised in Sheffield by parents who worked in education (and were the first in their families to attend university), Hill lives next door to her Marylebone office with her husband– who is in venture capitalism–and their two toddlers. They moved to Hampstead during lockdown but soon came back to Zone 1 because the wilds of Kenwood felt “too far out”.

Her customers are similarly defined by their need to be at the centre of the action. The company’s research shows that shoppers such as these are driven by #Fomo and getting their hands on things before anybody else does. It was one of them who told Hill over lunch in 2012, back when she was starting up, to create an Instagram account and not to bother with email. She still doesn’t.”Email makes you think of sitting down at a desk to make a decision,” she says. “Whereas when we put a post up we can get 100 DMs [direct messages] within an hour.” But august fashion houses evolve at Darwinian speed rather than tech-sector pace.

Such is the upper echelon’s fixation with gate-keeping who can buy certain pieces, some luxury brands have taken almost two decades even to sell through their own websites, let alone through a start-up operating via social media. Yet even the snootiest brands saw the merits in Threads Styling early on when the customers they handled dropped thousands on items they’d only ever seen on social media. “We were bringing them 21-year-olds who’d buy the highest-value piece in the shop. We ended up having ambassadors who worked in retail within the brands, who knew we could sell to these cool young clients. We posted the fluffy Saint Laurent heart coat [a £10,000 scarlet fox fur jacket, from the label’s autumn 2016 collection and worn by Rihanna] and sold it the same day out of the store’s window just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“I had assumed that she employed the usual sorts of highend personal shoppers–formerly of Selfridges perhaps, or between freelance gigs for Vogue. Some are, but many have joined on the ground floor. Such was the initial take-up of the services her fledgling company offered, Hill has built into its structure a training programme for personal stylists to learn the ropes on the job, often straight out of school or university.”We realised early on that there wasn’t going to be enough talent with the demand that was coming,” Hill explains. “Luxury shoppers are looking for guidance.”

As are the rest of us, albeit on rather different budgets. Threads Styling now has almost 700,000 followers, most of whom will never buy through the service. For them, rather than being the sartorial equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet, it is for the 0.01 per cent–it serves up bitesize morsels of street style-esque photos and magazine-like shots that provide inspiration and an aspirational view into even the most micro of trends.

“I grew up with magazines,” Hill says. “But it wasn’t like everyone could afford everything in them. Our followers help us decide what brands we really care about and [they] want to know what’s being talked about. We’ve said from the beginning that content on social is really, really good for brands.”

Content is Queen

Hill calls it its “content factory”: 36 people creating posts on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Weibo designed to hype new items or better showcase the sort of elusive must-haves that don’t tend to pop up on shopping sites. Birkin bags on marble table tops with croissants and flat whites. Chanel logostamped jeans. The artist Yayoi Kusama’s recent capsule collection with Louis Vuitton. “Finding this collab harder to bag than a Beyoncé ticket?” reads the caption beneath this last. “We’ve got access without the wait.” More than half the sales are driven by the content the team creates.

Most of the Insta posts have 2,000-5,000 likes and speak in young-person patois such as “Major feels!”, “fits” (translation: outfits) and “POV”, which stands for “point of view” and is a precursor to a jokey/insightful scenario (the POV of needing three pairs of Hermès sandals, for example). Yet for all the lightheartedness, the habits of young luxury consumers don’t point to the industry’s “this old thing” mindset of previous decades.

“Gen Z are thoughtful customers,” Hill says. “They like to understand the values of a brand, what it stands for. They’re not buying a handbag for this season; they want something that will last three or four years.

“[Millennials] are investing more in high price points; more classic buys, fine jewellery. Things that are going to hold their value, for resale.” She cites £3,000 Dior Bar jackets and Hermès Birkins as typically bankable purchases, and an uptick of interest in vintage pieces.

There was a time, during her late twenties, when Sophie Hill worked seven-day weeks and her parents stocked her freezer with meals when they visited. She has packed boxes, sorted receipts, rung round boutiques during the great Celine necklace shortage of 2018, and ferried things to clients in the middle of the night. Given how much of her business is driven by instant messaging, I ask how tethered to her phone she still is. “I have a lot of rules around it,” she replies. “If everything’s fine, I put it away at 7pm. If I’m with the kids, it’s quality time. Exercise is the one thing I would never give up. But I don’t think anyone in my position can get away with not working hard.”