"Your portfolio looks like everyone else's."
Seven words that made me want to delete my entire styling career and retrain as an art teacher.
I was sitting in a glass-walled meeting room at a London talent agency, my carefully curated portfolio glowing on their computer screen. They flicked through it quietly, and with every pause, my anxiety deepened...as if the silence itself were evidence of my creative inadequacy.
"It's all very... celebrity," she said, finally looking up. "Beautiful work, but I can see you're trying to move into commercial styling. This portfolio tells a different story than where you want to go."
She was right. Every image screamed red carpet and celebrity styling when I desperately wanted to book commercial campaigns. My portfolio was a perfect representation of where I'd been, not where I was heading.
"If you want to work with brands and commercial clients, they need to see that you understand their world," she continued. "Right now, this looks like someone who's nailed celebrity styling but might not get commercial briefs."
I wanted to explain that I could absolutely do commercial work. That my celebrity background would bring sophistication to brand campaigns. That I understood commercial styling even if my portfolio didn't show it.
Instead, I sat there realising my portfolio was sabotaging my career pivot.
That uncomfortable ten-minute conversation nearly made me give up on transitioning into commercial work. It also showed me exactly what needed to change.
Here's what I wish someone had told me before that meeting: there's a difference between portfolio feedback and portfolio destruction. Good feedback identifies specific problems and offers actionable solutions. Destruction just tears down without building up.
But even brutal feedback can be valuable if you know how to decode it.
What that agent was really saying wasn't that my work was bad. It was that my portfolio wasn't working as a business tool. It wasn't answering the questions potential clients needed answered. It wasn't positioning me for the work I wanted to do.
My portfolio was a highlight reel of my past work, not a preview of my future value.
The problem wasn't my styling ability. It was my portfolio strategy.
In today's Substack, I'm sharing the complete portfolio strategy that transformed my career - the exact framework I used to go from rejected to represented, and how you can apply it to position yourself for the work you actually want.