Last October, John Hardy hosted an intimate cocktail in partnership with fashion writer laura reilly, alongside the brand’s master artisans from Bali. The evening centered around a hands-on chain-weaving workshop, designed less as a DIY exercise than as a way to make the brand’s craftsmanship tangible. By the end of the night, we left not with the bracelets we had been weaving but with finished pieces from the collection and a clear understanding of the intricacies and labor that went into them.
Across fashion and accessories, brands are increasingly calling on creators, stylists, and tastemakers to host styling salons, craft workshops, and private shopping parties. What might once have been a standard transaction has become far more experiential. For a moment, though, it felt as if physical retail might never recover. The pandemic accelerated a years-long shift towards e-commerce, and storefronts that once anchored shopping culture sat empty. But retail has made an impressive comeback, with in-store traffic and sales both rising steadily over the past year. According to a report by Colliers, in December 2025 alone, retail foot traffic rose 2.8% year over year, alongside 3.8% sales growth. What has changed is not just that people are shopping in person again, but what gets them through the door.
On April 8th, Rothy’s celebrated its Nordstrom launch with an invite-only styling event with denna Nazem. The brand has hosted similar tastemaker-led moments like a pizza-making party at Fini with Emily Sundberg ahead of the Williamsburg store opening, and vintage shopping and styling events with Erika Veurink and Allison Bornstein. As Lacey White, Rothy’s Director of VIP, Influencer, and Events, puts it, “The store becomes the backdrop, but the host sets the tone, and that makes the experience feel personal rather than transactional.”
At Still Here’s Madison Avenue location, stylist Kelly Klein recently partnered with the brand on an in-store event, a particularly strong example of how the stylist-led retail model is evolving. The shift is especially powerful in that they collapse multiple roles into one trusted figure: editor, host, and salesperson. They are the person shaping the point of view, curating the room, and often guiding the purchase itself. What once might have required a campaign, a sales associate, and a separate content strategy now often begins with a single person whose taste the audience already trusts. As Eliza Rolfs, Head of Brand at Still Here, explains, “[Stylists] bring a distinct point of view. There is an ease and credibility in how they style and speak about the product that cannot really be replicated.” In a sense, these experiences function as a kind of retail behavior intervention, transforming passive familiarity into physical entry and ideally, long-term affinity. A store someone may have walked past dozens of times suddenly becomes the place they want to be, not simply because of the product, but because of the person inviting them in. The creator is no longer just driving awareness online; they are increasingly shaping the conditions under which a purchase begins, turning trust and taste into foot traffic.
That said, even though many of these activations start as invitation-led experiences, the lifespan quickly extends through Instagram Stories, Reels, creator posts, group photos, and saved styling content that continues to circulate long after the event itself, often taking on, as White describes it, “a longer shelf life than a typical paid partnership.” The in-store experience becomes both a community touchpoint and a content engine, allowing a single evening to drive ongoing discovery, conversation, and, ultimately, conversion. As Rolfs notes, “We have loved seeing how these moments continue through the hosts’ own platforms, especially in longer form ways like Substack. It gives the event a different kind of life that we would not necessarily create on our own.”
For creators and stylists, these events function as far more than a typical paid partnership. As stylist Jamie Grimstad Huth explains, they have become “the most important touchpoint” in her business, a place to build trust, establish relationships, and guide decision-making in real time. Unlike digital content, where the recommendation can still feel abstract, the in-person format allows for fitting, adjusting, styling, and helping clients make decisions on the spot. In her words, “it compresses the entire sales funnel into a single moment.”
The conversion can be significant. Just last week, Huth hosted an in-person spring edit in Florida and sold more than 80 items, roughly $65,000 worth of merchandise, in under two hours, a level of velocity that she notes is “very difficult to achieve digitally.” For her, the power of these events lies in the fact that the selection reads as a recommendation rather than a transaction, reinforcing trust and driving repeat, long-term sales.
ShopMy’s data shows how directly these events can drive sales. Following the Rothy’s styling event with Denna Nazem, orders ran 60–130+% above baseline in the 72 hours that followed, peaking the day after the event. Creator engagement nearly doubled on the day itself, with linking activity jumping from an average of 56 daily saves to 105, suggesting that the event functioned as both a discovery moment and a demand driver. A similar, though slightly different, pattern emerged at Still Here, where orders and GMV surged 2–3x baseline levels in the immediate aftermath of its Kelly Klein event, even as creator linking remained largely flat. In other words, one event drove discovery and conversion, while the other primarily accelerated existing demand.
Beyond the numbers, part of what makes these experiences resonate is that they offer something increasingly scarce in both retail and online culture: intimacy. They create occasion around what might otherwise be a routine purchase and turn shopping into something participatory, social, and worth showing up for. In an era of endless scrolling and passive discovery, this programming offers a sense of access, not just to a product but to a trusted point of view and the community that comes with it. Perhaps the most successful retail experiences today do not begin at the checkout, but with an invitation.
*Cover image via Rosa Noboa
Loved what kelly did with still here!
Seeing a lot of gifted and community led styling events happen in London too!