Long Christmas List? You Can Outsource It

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New York Sunday Times - December 14, 2003

Long Christmas List? You Can Outsource It

By Julie Flaherty

She soon settled on a likely gift for Hannah, 17: a bracelet-style watch with a translucent rubber strap in ice blue. Hannah may be too young for her first Cartier, Ms. von Sperling said, but this will tide her over nicely.

"It's hip, it's young, it's rubber," she said, admiring it under the store's flattering lights. The price was an acceptable $125, well within budget.

Never mind that Ms. von Sperling has never met Hannah. As a personal shopper, she is paid to find perfect, heartfelt presents for everyone on someone else's list. On this day, it took about two hours to find gifts for six of the seven people on the list of her client, an editor who is the mother of two teenagers.

"It's O.K. to say: 'You know what? I'm too busy. I have no idea what these kids want. I hate shopping. It puts me in an evil mood, and I'm not known for my gift-giving skills,' " she said as she scanned the window displays on Newbury Street here.

Many people think of personal shoppers as professional clotheshorses who help busy women put together their wardrobes. During the holiday season, though, their regular clients - plus a few seasonal ones - often ask them for assistance with much broader shopping lists.

Samantha von Sperling, foreground, tries on earrings in front of a mirror at
Emporio Armani, where Svetlana Eghterafi works.

Watching Samantha von Sperling shop, you quickly get the feeling that she has never wasted time looking for a space in a mall parking lot. Eschewing the crowds, she began her holiday shopping early last month with a Thursday-morning romp through Emporio Armani, where she had the store practically to herself.

But outsourcing holiday chores is not cheap. Personal shoppers who work independently may charge $25 to $250 an hour or more; many also ask to be reimbursed for transportation costs. And while the personal-shopping services offered by some high-end department stores are free, the shoppers, some of whom work on commission, cannot do much comparison shopping because they are limited to what is available in their stores.

In economic booms, some personal shoppers will sometimes get more business than they can handle comfortably. These days, however, many would describe business about the same way as some retailers would - not exactly brisk, though slow and steady.

"Their budgets are a little bit lower, and they are very targeted in whom they are giving to," Deborrah Ashley, a personal shopper in Atlanta, said of both her corporate and individual clients.

Linda Lee, who started the personal shopping service at Macy's department stores 25 years ago and is now the group vice president of special services for the chain, would not provide specific sales figures, though she said that during the holidays about 85 percent of the calls to the service, called Macy's by Appointment, were related to gifts.

"The people that come to us typically for wardrobe suddenly say, 'Can you do my Christmas shopping for me?' " she said.

There is no specific set of qualifications for becoming a personal shopper. Ms. Lee hires some of her staff members from sales positions, but she considers anyone who has a talent in reading a person's needs and wants.

"It could be an interior designer, or someone who has been in real estate and has experience evaluating which home is appropriate for which purchaser," she said. "You need to have a good taste level, but it doesn't have to be my taste level."

Lesley Barnette, who owns Jazz Personal Management, a service in Nashua, N.H. (www.jazzpersonalmanagement.com), bills herself as a professional organizer who will put in order everything from home closets to office filing systems. But her knack for order, she says, also makes her an efficient shopper. She is working with a small-business owner who has about 20 people on a holiday gift list.

"For her, it just makes sense not to spend her valuable time shopping," Ms. Barnette said. "She would rather be building her business."

Ms. Barnette, who goes by the nickname "Jazz," considers herself a customer of good taste, but she is perhaps more relevantly a woman of patience.

"I'm not a compulsive shopper," she said. "I take my time and research and look carefully at things." When her clients are paying her $50 an hour, though, they also expect her to be expedient. She says she uses a spreadsheet instead of a mere shopping list, including a column for each recipient's age, hobbies, sports, interests, past gifts received, satisfaction with those gifts and possible shopping destinations. ("Maybe they're an L.L. Bean or Eddie Bauer kind of person," she said.)

Most important, she solicits some seed ideas from her clients. Most people have the creativity to give good gifts, she said, but they need to be coaxed. "Having an objective party to not only bounce their ideas off and validate them but to expand them is probably what's really most helpful for people," she said. "They are just coming to me maybe for that great idea and the legwork that people don't want to do or don't have time to do."

Ms. Ashley, in Atlanta, says she got her start in the personal-shopping business in her father's insurance office, where she would buy the gifts for his assistants and clients. She now charges busy professionals - like a judge, a comedian and lawyers -$25 an hour to take care of their long gift lists. In her business, called Ashley's Personal Shopping (www.debbieashley.com), she also tackles holiday cards, right down to copying the boss's signature.

The holidays are clearly her crunch time. "They wait until the week before to call me in desperation," she said.

Ms. von Sperling's three-year-old business, Polished Social Image Consultants (www.socialimage.net), includes lessons in etiquette, dance, speech and overall style, in addition to personalized shopping. She charges [$300] an hour for shopping services.

Her gift-giving credentials go back to her youth. Her father is a psychiatrist from Britain, and her mother is an industrial designer from France. She says her family spent time hobnobbing with ambassadors and presidents at parties in Europe and South America, and it was in both places that she learned about etiquette and hostess gifts. "I knew from an early age what the protocol was," she said.

She said her mother had taught her about the finer things in life. Their Saturday afternoons were often spent curled up with a block of fine chocolate and copies of French Vogue and French Elle. Her mother would read to her while she looked at the pictures. "That's one of my warm, fuzzy memories," Ms. von Sperling said. "My mother loved to shop - really loved to shop."

Although she has been known to buy silver teething rings from Tiffany for baby showers, she can appreciate a bargain. After her recent trip to Armani, her next stop was Crate & Barrel, where she picked up a red leather photo album, at $44.95, for one of her client's friends.

Her client, Suki Sporer, 49, a manuscript editor at the Harvard Business Review, said her family would probably end up with more personalized gifts than usual this year. She typically puts off Hanukkah shopping until the last minute. "I end up doing a lot of catalog buying and gift certificates for my kids and stuff like that," she said. She also tends to go over budget, while Ms. von Sperling kept well within her guidelines of $200 a person.

Although Ms. von Sperling searched for the gifts, Ms. Sporer said she had final approval. "She narrowed it down to choices," she said, "but ultimately, it was my choice."

Choice may be one reason to pick an independent shopper over a department store service. An independent personal shopper may look for one-of-a-kind gifts in boutiques or high-end department stores and search a discount store for the best prices. (Ms. Barnette has a particular affection for Home Goods and T.J. Maxx.)

But that doesn't mean that department stores' personal shoppers show customers only the most expensive items. Stores provide personal-shopping services to build customer loyalty, and exceeding a customer's budget rarely leads to repeat business.

"I wouldn't say it's as close as a friendship, but it is a relationship," Amanda Nicholson, an assistant professor of retail management at Syracuse University, said of the client-shopper bond. "If the personal shopper betrays that trust, like everything else, you get found out. It's just not going to be to their benefit."

Because customers entrust much personal information to their shopping surrogate, they should always check the background of their shopper, Ms. Nicholson added. Department stores usually keep a credit card on file for purchases, while some independent shoppers may also use a client's card.

"That would be, to me, like having someone clean your house or come to baby-sit," she said. "I would want a reference from another client, especially for an independent."

The Association of Image Consultants International in Dallas (www.aici.org), which has about 450 members, offers certification for image professionals, many of whom do some form of personal shopping.

Many professional shoppers have one thing in common: a true love for shopping.

"For me, it's the thrill of the hunt," Ms. von Sperling said as she continued her search that Thursday morning, stopping at Williams-Sonoma (for peppermint bark candy), Crane & Company (for Visconti fountain pens modeled after the colors in van Gogh paintings) and Starbucks (for a much-needed shot of espresso).

The gift recipients may never know the role she played, but they may appreciate the newfound serenity of the gift giver.

"It's going to keep you from feeling drained from the holidays," she said, "and keep you from feeling grouchy and Grinchlike."

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