46: Unlock Your Style Potential: 6 Simple Steps to Building a Wardrobe You Love with Heather Riggs
On this episode of the HobbyScool podcast, Dr. Destini Copp welcomes Heather Riggs, a certified image consultant and color specialist with 15 years of experience. Heather lives just outside of Philadelphia with her husband and five-year-old son.
After her son's birth and the COVID-19 pandemic, Heather revamped her services to work with women virtually, now offering her expertise to women all over the world. Her goal is to empower ambitious women to confidently dress every day.
Heather helps women discover their best colors and build wardrobes they love through her program and one-on-one assistance. She emphasizes the importance of feeling confident and looking your best in the present, rather than waiting for a future goal. Heather provides six simple steps to build a wardrobe, including dialing in your signature style, flattering your figure, and discovering your best colors.
In this episode, Heather discusses her step-by-step process for building a wardrobe, addressing the challenge of fluctuating sizes. She encourages individuals to be more intentional about their wardrobe choices, trusting their own intuition and feeling amazing in their clothes.
Heather draws a parallel between grocery shopping and shopping for clothes, emphasizing the need for a plan and a list of needed items.
Listeners are advised to assess their calendar events and prioritize shopping based on the gaps in their wardrobe and available budget.
So, tune in to this episode of HobbyScool and discover how to build a wardrobe you love with Heather Riggs.
The Six Simple Steps to Building a Wardrobe:
In this episode, our host, Dr. Destini Copp, sits down with Heather Riggs, a certified image consultant and color specialist with 15 years of experience in the industry. Heather's passion lies in empowering women to gain confidence and dress with intention. Today's discussion focuses on the process of building a wardrobe that reflects your unique style and meets your lifestyle needs. Let's dive into Heather's expert advice on creating a wardrobe you love.
Heather outlines her step-by-step process for building a wardrobe that aligns with your style and needs:
1. Dial in your signature style:
Heather encourages individuality and acknowledges that most women don't fit into a single style category. She emphasizes the importance of considering lifestyle, preferred colors, career goals, and wardrobe needs.
2. Learn how to flatter your figure:
Understanding your body shape and choosing garments that enhance your features is a crucial aspect of building a wardrobe that makes you feel confident.
3. Discover your best colors:
Heather believes that incorporating the right colors into your wardrobe can elevate your appearance and enhance trustworthiness. She provides insights into choosing colors that match your personal preferences.
4. Conduct a closet audit:
By assessing your current wardrobe, you can identify gaps and determine what pieces are missing. This audit helps streamline your shopping and prevents impulse purchases.
5. Design your dream capsule:
Heather advises creating a personalized wardrobe capsule based on your lifestyle, preferences, and needs. This ensures that each piece serves a purpose and can be mixed and matched effortlessly.
6. Start shopping or styling:
Armed with knowledge of your style, figure-flattering techniques, and color choices, Heather recommends strategic shopping or styling sessions to fill in the gaps and make intentional purchases.
Defining Your Signature Style:
Heather has developed a quiz to help women define their unique signature looks. She emphasizes that style is not solely based on personal preferences but is influenced by factors like lifestyle, preferred colors, and wardrobe needs. After taking the quiz, participants receive a follow-up email series that assists in refining and honing their style.
The Importance of Color:
Colors play a significant role in making a positive first impression in our fast-paced society. Heather highlights different ways to incorporate colors into your wardrobe, such as leveraging eye color, grounding pieces with hair color repetition, and embracing natural blush tones.
Building a Wardrobe for Fluctuating Sizes:
The host raises the common challenge of fluctuating sizes and the desire to have options available in the closet that are loved. Heather acknowledges this issue and advises individuals to be more intentional about their wardrobe choices. By having a plan and shopping with intention, individuals can create a versatile wardrobe that accommodates size variations.
Trusting Your Own Style Intuition:
While Heather provides recommendations and advice, she encourages individuals to trust their own style intuition. Feeling amazing in your clothing choices is crucial, even if it deviates from conventional wisdom. Heather believes that each individual possesses more knowledge about their style preferences than they realize, fostering empowerment and self-confidence.
The Importance of Planning and Intentional Shopping:
Drawing a parallel between grocery shopping and shopping for clothes, Heather reinforces the need for planning and intentionality. By considering upcoming events, evaluating wardrobe gaps, and prioritizing shopping within budgetary constraints, individuals can shop more strategically and avoid unnecessary purchases.
Conclusion:
By embracing your unique style, understanding your body shape, and incorporating the right colors, you can gain confidence and make a positive first impression. Heather's step-by-step process, along with her emphasis on trusting your intuition and shopping intentionally, empowers ambitious women to create their dream wardrobes. To learn more and connect with Heather, visit her Instagram and website, where you can find her signature style quiz and wardrobe essentials guide. Start your journey towards dressing with confidence today!
Mentioned In This Episode
Where to find Heather: Website and Instagram
Free Gift: My Guide To Creating Your Own Wardrobe Essentials Checklist
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Transcript:
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:03]:
And my special guest today is Heather Riggs. Heather is the founder of her style and host of her style podcast. As a 15 year certified image consultant and color specialist, Heather impires vicious women to step out of their insecurities and enter their calling by showing up and getting dressed every day with confidence. And, Heather, I am super excited to jump into this topic with you, and we're gonna be talking about how to build a wardrobe you love. And I have a ton of questions, but before we get into them, Can you tell the audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
Heather Riggs [00:00:48]:
Absolutely. And Destiny, I'm so excited to be here. It's an honor to be on the podcast with you. So thank you 1st and foremost for having me. Yeah. So you summed it up really well. I've been a certified image consultant and color specialist for the past 15 years dating myself a little bit. I have a husband of about the same time period and we have a now five year old son. So we live just outside of Philadelphia. But after my son was born and COVID happened, I really revamped all my services to be able to work with women virtually. I think that's what people want right now is to be able with people from the comfort of their own home, and it's been such a great experience. I've been able to open up my services now to women all over the world. So that's been such a great experience. And as you mentioned, I love empowering ambitious women to get show up and get dressed every day with confidence, and we do that through helping them discover their best colors Building out wardrobes they love. So I have a program for that and then, of course, helping women one on one whether they have a personal brand online and they want to show up at their best and most confident or if they just really want to build out their wardrobe and have a more functional closet that actually works for their everyday life.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:02:01]:
Now, Heather, one of the things that you and I were talking about before we started recording was and I think a lot of people who are listening here can relate to this. I know that I personally have a closet full of clothes. I mean, our our closet is huge. It could be you could almost fit a bedroom in there. and I don't feel like I have anything to wear most of the days. Can you talk us through why that you know, what what are those reasons behind that, and what can we do about it?
Heather Riggs [00:02:31]:
Yes. Well, first of all, you're not alone. there are statistics that show that at least in America, we wear less than 10% of what we own. So most of us find ourselves in that position. And I think the kinda bigger umbrella reason why that is is because we're shopping on impulse rather than with intention. So you might be just kinda running out to grab something that you need to wear for a dinner or an event one night, and you're not thinking about the big picture of your wardrobe and what you need on a day to day basis. So it's something that happens to a lot of us as women. We kind of find ourselves in that boat. And I think another piece of that is, you know, if our lives are transitioning, as we get older, we find ourselves in different seasons of life. Maybe you've changed careers or you've relocated or your family has grown or those kinds of things and we're not keeping up with our wardrobe, there's will be a mismatch at some point in your life. and that might be happening right now. So whether, you know, your life has transitioned and your wardrobe hasn't, there's lots of different reasons that that can be. but really the best way to fix it is to just start being more intentional about what you bring into your closet.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:03:47]:
Well, how do how exactly does that work? because I know I am going on vacation. We're going to Branson, Missouri to baseball tournaments. And I was like, you know what? I need some more, like, casual tight shirts, right, to wear with shorts. What would what do what does it mean about being more intentional?
Heather Riggs [00:04:04]:
Yeah. So I think it's funny because, you know, when we go grocery shopping, I know for myself, I don't go without a list because I know when I go to the grocery store without a list, I'm gonna get a whole bunch of things that look really good at the time, and then I'm gonna go home and realize I didn't get the right ingredients to actually make a meal for dinner for my family. And it's the same when we go shopping. If we're going without a plan, without a list of what we actually need, we will get very distracted by shiny object syndrome and reach for, you know, the pretty top or that cute dress instead of maybe getting the shorts that you need for your vacation. or maybe you need a pair of really comfortable basic sandals, but that's not as fun as the cute heels that you got distracted by. So it's going with a game plan and knowing what you need, whether it's for a specific event like a vacation or for your wardrobe for the whole season, I usually recommend that women look about 3 months at a time. Start with your calendar. Look at what events you have coming up and then take compare that with what's in your wardrobe. Do you actually have what you need for those events? That's when you can really start to get more intentional and preplan so that when you do go shopping, you know, number 1, where are the gaps are in your wardrobe, what you need right now, and you can start to prioritize your shopping list and line it up with the budget that you have available.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:05:24]:
Well, Heather, I know that you have a step by step process to help people build a wardrobe that they love. And one of the things that I was thinking about as you were going through that I I've been different sizes over the years, and I think a lot of women listening to this could probably relate to this. You know? I've been to size 10. I've been to size 12. I've been to size 6. 7 to size 14 is crazy. Right? So can you walk us through those steps? What would you recommend for somebody like that to build this wardrobe that we love to go into that closet. We're like, yes. I can actually find something to wear.
Heather Riggs [00:05:59]:
Yes. Of course. And before we dive into the steps, I will say that's a really common hang up for women is if they are on a weight loss journey or if they're not exactly where they wanna be in terms of their size. I know sometimes we don't want to invest a lot in our wardrobe when we're hoping that those clothes won't fit us maybe by theendoftheyear. So in that case, I would recommend doing this, but just building out a smaller cap for right now because I want you to look and feel your best today. I don't want you to be waiting on a specific goal or some kind of future reward for yourself once you hit that, you're gonna feel so much better along that journey if you're really showing up confidently right now. So Just take the same steps and apply them to just a smaller capsule wardrobe. Don't feel like you need to go out and buy everything today. but get what you need to be able to kind of feel your best along the way. So, I do have 6 simple steps to build a wardrobe that you love, and you can do this no matter your calendar, your cash flow, or your current clothing size. These are really foundational steps. And I recommend that once you get these dialed in, you can just kind of rinse and repeat season after season. So step 1 is dialing in your signature style. This is a really key piece because we have 7 seconds to make a first impression. It's really important to know how you wanna show up and tell an accurate story about who you are through your wardrobe. So knowing your style and what is gonna bring out your best is so important, and it will help you make all the rest of the decisions. Because if you have, you know, a more feminine or a more classic style, that's gonna dictate the fabrics that you choose, the silhouettes you gravitate toward, the colors that you wear. So This is a really key first piece. So, that's step number 1. Step number 2 is learning how to flatter your figure. Now the great news is that our body as well, we might fluctuate in size. The basic structure of our body is don't doesn't change very much with our weight. So, for example, your proportions aren't going to change if you go up or down a couple of sizes. So understanding things like your body's proportions, your basic inherent silhouette, that's the body shape you were born with. For me, I have a triangle figure, which means my hips are a little bit wider than my shoulders. So no matter how much my weight fluctuates over the years, that's just my weight always goes towards my hip area. And there's different tricks I can learn to balance that through my my outfit choices. So, understanding how to flatter your figure, knowing how to balance your proportions and your shape and all of that is the really great next step in the puzzle. The third piece is discovering your best colors. Color is such an important piece because wearing your best colors can brighten you up. It can make you look younger and more refreshed. Whereas wearing the wrong colors for you can make us look tired or under the weather, or older or things that we definitely don't want. So it is a really helpful thing to know your basic best colors and whether you look good in warm, neutral, or cool colors. So, that is one of my favorite things to do with women is showing them those tricks. Then once you get those basic 3 foundations, you can really start tackling what's in your closet. I recommend doing a closet audit at that point. Going through how you realistically spend your time, what you have in your current closet and figuring out how that matches up so you can locate those gaps and start making your shopping list like we talked about. Then step number 5, is designing your dream capsule. Whether you're doing this for a smaller number of items to get you through a weight loss journey, for example, or whether you're building out a a full capsule for your wardrobe. And when I say capsule, I don't mean it in the sense that, you know, Sometimes you'll hear, like, you can have 33 pieces or there's a specific number. It's really personalized to what's gonna be best for you, how many pieces you wanna have, all of that. But, again, this is kind of the the fun part about being intentional with your wardrobe and figuring out what you want it to look like, how many pieces you wanna have, you know, how it's gonna line up with your everyday life. That's really the fun part in kinda bringing it home. And then step 6 is starting your shopping adventures and going out and filling in those gaps with confidence, knowing what you need based on the earlier foundations and what's on your list, or if you are tight on your budget or you have a lot of great pieces to work with, maybe it's just styling those items in new ways. So step 6 is kind of shopping and or styling depending on where you're at.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:35]:
Well, you gave us a ton of stuff to unpack here. So -- Yes. -- for the lot of great information. I do wanna go back to the first step, which was dialing in your signature style. And I know you have a quiz on your website. I actually took it this morning because I was like, I saw it. I was like, oh, I gotta delve into this and kind of, you know, figure out what mine is. And I think it came out to be I don't have it in front of me right now, but it was, like, classic, neutral. There was percentages there. Can you walk us through how do we figure out our signature style
Heather Riggs [00:11:05]:
Yes. Well, obviously, my quiz is a great cheat sheet for that because it will, you know, give you your top 3 results because found over the years most women don't fall into just one bracket. Most of us don't have a 100% classic style. We maybe like a few other elements of different things. So it's really figuring out how to bring it all together to create your own unique signature look. And that's not just based on your personal preferences. A lot of times, I think this is where we find that disconnect. As women, we might gravitate toward a particular style visually. We like the way that it looks. But we also need to consider what is our lifestyle, what are our actual day to day needs from our wardrobe, what colors do we like, what sort of fabrics do we gravitate towards? What are our career goals? There's a lot of different pieces that should really be considered when you're defining your own unique style. So the quiz is definitely a great way to dissect all of those different pieces and then figure out what that is. But it doesn't stop there. So, now you've gotten your quiz results, Destiny, but what's great about that is I have a follow-up email series that will really help you to hone that in even further. Once you have those different umbrella terms, you can start to look at what are the favorite piece is in your current wardrobe? And then what do you love about those pieces to really figure out your style values? Whether it's that you like pieces that are more versatile or more comfortable or that have a dramatic edge and really bring all eyes on you when you walk in the room. It's it's starting to have awareness of those different factors and then bringing it all together.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:39]:
And I look forward to kinda delving into those emails when I when I get them. I wanna switch gears just a little bit. I would talk about step 3 in your process, which was discovering your best colors. And I I will tell you that I feel like a lot of my stuff is just black in my closet. Yeah. I may have some pop of colors here and there, but a lot of it is just black. So walk us through a little bit about, you know, some why why is color important, and how can we use those in our day to day life?
Heather Riggs [00:13:12]:
Yeah. I love sharing this statistic. It absolutely blew my mind when I heard it, but up to 90% of someone's gut reaction about you is based on color alone. up to 90%.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:13:25]:
That's amazing.
Heather Riggs [00:13:26]:
Yeah. And that's you know, whether you're looking at an individual or evaluating a product or an environment, you're our brains are looking at color and using psychology to make decisions about that. And it's so important in today's world where people are so hurried Right? And we're in a swipe left, swipe right, you know, kind of society. It's important to show up at your best and make a really great first impression whether you are you know, going on a job interview or meeting with a potential client or even making new friends as an adult or dating. It's so critical to show up at your best and color is one of the biggest ways to do that. It's such a huge needle mover. So I love empowering women to figure out their best colors. Of course, that is partly based on your personal coloring. So your skin tone, your hair, and eye colors But where I'm my approach is a little different than a lot of color specialists is I also like to infuse your personality and your preferences because I could tell you, Destiny, that you look amazing in blues, but if you don't like the color blue, that's not really gonna be helpful to you. So it's kind of getting more specific to what you need and then going from there. But I could share, you know, a couple basic colors that are sort of foolproof if you are interested. Yeah. don't you do that? I'm I'm interested. I'm sure the audience is too. Okay. One of my favorite colors to recommend you wear is your eye color. And the reason for that is, number 1, it's inherent to you. You you know, whatever your eye color is, it's made to look beautiful on you. So there's not a lot of guess work there. If you have brown eyes, then you can, you know, safely wear, you know, beautiful chocolate tones. If you have blue eyes, you can you know, kinda pull your eye color out, especially wearing it close to your face, is so powerful because it's gonna give you a really trustworthy and approachable appearance psychologically speaking. So that is a fantastic color to where in those situations where you might be going for an interview or an initial meeting with someone. and you want to really be able to maintain good eye contact and communication and look really approachable and trustworthy. So that's a super powerful one. Your hair color is also a really great color to repeat throughout your outfit. I love to wear that especially in grounding pieces like shoes, your belt a handbag because that's gonna give you a really down to earth look. And it'll just help to keep the eye moving up and down your outfit as well, so creates a lot of visual interest. So your hair color is a great one to repeat. Also, for women, one of the most flattering colors that you can wear is your natural blush color. And this is where it gets a little trickier because you wanna know whether you look best in kind of cool pink tones or warm peach colors. So that's where it's helpful to bring in an expert to kind of guide you in that way. But if you can see clearly your natural blush color after you get out of a hot shower or go for a run. And if you echo that in your clothing, it's gonna make you look more attractive more feminine and, of course, approachable. So those are just a couple quick ones right out of the gate that you could get started with.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:16:32]:
And those are some really, really great tips. But but, Heather, before we wrap it up here, do you have any last minute tips for the audience?
Heather Riggs [00:16:42]:
Yes. I think what I'd really love to leave everyone with is just empowering them to trust their own intuition. when it comes to style. I can certainly give you my recommendations and give you lots of advice. But at the end of the day, it's so important for you to trust yourself when you're getting dressed and to feel your best because if you don't feel confident when you're looking in the mirror, when you're walking out the door, it will show. So it's most important that you are wearing clothes that make you feel amazing whether it's something I've advised for you or if you're deviating from the path. I just I wanna lend the idea that you know more than you think you do. And most of my clients are really surprised by our work together that they do know more than they thought going into the process, and it's such an empowering feeling to know you can trust yourself when it comes to your style.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:17:31]:
And, Heather, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing you know, these 6 steps and all the tips that you had regarding color and creating our signature style. But before we hang up here, can you let the audience know where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.
Heather Riggs [00:17:50]:
I do. Yes. I would love to connect with you and, you know, if you have any specific questions following the interview, I'm happy to answer those. You can find me on in at heatherriggsstyle or connect with me through my website, which is herstylellc.com. and I would love for you to take the free quiz and figure out what your signature style is. But one of the questions I get asked a lot is, you know, what are the essentials that every woman should have in her wardrobe. And my answer is always unexpected because I don't think there's one set list of pieces that every woman should have because it does depend on what you like to wear and what your lifestyle is. So what I did instead was put together my guide to creating your own wardrobe essentials checklist so you can walk through a few simple steps and figure out what you need in your wardrobe specifically so you don't end up feeling like you have a closet full of clothes with nothing to wear. So they can find that at her style llc.com forward slash gift.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:18:50]:
and we will make sure all of those links are in the show notes so people can click on them, Heather, and find you. And thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, thank you for having me. This is so much fun.