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 Top-shop 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
