Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandi Johnson.
Hi Brandi, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My full name is Brandeis. I was named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
But, since we’re friends, you can call me Brandi. Everybody does. 🙂
I am a personal style expert and confidence coach, speaker, writer, and the founder of Brandeis Nicole, a personal style & coaching firm.
After earning degrees at Brown University and UC Berkeley, I led a storied career as a learning and development leader and executive at a national consulting firm. I managed a large national team and did program oversight and curriculum design for a national suite of products. I was also an Assistant Professor at two different graduate schools in New York.
During my tenure as a leader, I quickly earned a reputation for style along with program design and training, and found myself coaching my colleagues on looking their best.
During that time, a dramatic weight gain from an endometriosis medication left me frustrated with ill-fitting clothes and wreaked havoc on my confidence. I would sit on the edge of my bed before work every morning and cry because nothing fit. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was punishing myself for gaining weight by refusing to invest in new clothes beyond the functional, though decidedly not stylish, ones I forced myself to buy in order to look appropriate at the office.
After a season of wearing clothes that only made me feel worse about myself and my changed body, I was determined to find a better way. I began shopping with renewed confidence and started to remind myself that my current body, yes at this size and weight, was just as deserving and capable of looking great.
I began honing my eye for great fit, which is about so much more than size or style. Compliments started rolling in, and colleagues and friends started asking me where and how I shopped and how I was able to put together such cohesive and inspiring looks.
I started styling a small number of clients, all friends and family, and then attended a styling conference where I was selected to join an intensive, invite-only training with Stacy London from TLC’s What Not to Wear, where I refined my signature methodology for personal styling, focusing on the science of style, body shape and fit.
An educator at heart, I’ve styled well over 1000 clients and I am known for my transformational approach to style as a pathway to confidence and authentic self-development. I have been called “style magic” and a “style goddess” by clients and I help women of all shapes and sizes, especially women navigating changing bodies, find the joy that happens when they confidently, powerfully and purposefully step into who they are with an effortless wardrobe to match.
I enjoy dance, fruity cocktails, get embarrassed for other people when watching reality shows, and I’ve never met a french fry I didn’t like. A Bay Area native who most recently called Brooklyn home for 15 years, I now reside in Houston, TX and love the H-town charm.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There have been ups and downs, for sure! One of the things I continually run into and continue to tweak in terms of my business model is developing a sustainable strategy for growth. I doubled revenue every year for the first three years by traveling — friends in different cities would host small gatherings for me and I would deliver a short workshop and offer some Q&A. That’s how I got my first clients. They would love the services, tell their friends, and the next time I came back to town, I would have more clients and also be able to serve my existing folks.
This worked really really well, but during busy seasons I was out of my home and on the road for 20-30 days at a time, sometimes 5 or 6 cities in a row. Living in New York at the time, all of the hustle felt normalized. but I knew after I left nonprofit/corporate management that I was determined to figure out how to have LESS hustle and more freedom. I think that’s why a lot of entrepreneurs start their businesses. The next thing you know, you’re working the same or longer hours than your 9-5!
So along with my decision to move to Houston for a more relaxed pace, I knew I needed to switch up my business model. I started focusing more heavily on growing my email community and my communities on social media. I wanted a way to be able to reach many without physically being there. I began developing and selling access to workshops and courses online, which was such a boon during the pandemic.
Relationships have always been at the core of what I do, and I’m really proud of the fact that even with an email list of 5000, individuals reach out to me directly to let me know how much my email or message touched them and helped them have a more positive mindset about their body and their style.
Ironically, I am headed into having more boutique, small group and 1:1 experiences again. I’m really excited about playing in that space in a different and more intentional way than before, and refining what I’m really good at for a new audience of women.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Brandeis Nicole?
Brandeis Nicole is a personal style, image and confidence coaching firm. We work with women and men to help them confidently re-imagine their image while authentically being true to themselves.
Our passion lies in working with women living in what we like to call “changing bodies”. A large percentage of our clients are mothers, and they’ve experienced the challenges not only in navigating a changing body postpartum, but also in the toll it takes on their self-esteem and mindset as they’re bombarded with messages to “bounce back” almost immediately after childbirth.
The truth is for most women, even if you lose the weight, and that is a big if, things have physically shifted around, gravity is real, and you’ve lost muscle tone.
My women clients who weren’t changed dramatically by childbirth or who are not parents still experience this. There are myriad reasons why bodies change and evolve: weight gain, age, health issues, etc.
Our bodies are *supposed* to evolve and change! We have unrealistic and damaging ideals, perpetuated by media messages and generational beliefs in our families, that we are supposed to look exactly the same from age 25 to 75. It’s bananas! We spend so much time trying to go back to have that body that we miss out on so many moments that are happening right now. Meanwhile, our closets are museums of past lives, instead of supporting our body size and the person we’ve grown into.
I bet she is so much wiser and so much better at so many things. So imagine what would happen if you started treating your current self as worthy and deserving of love, care, and great style.
What I’ve learned, and what I’m really good at, is providing a transformation for women that goes beyond the clothes. Yes, they will get an amazing wardrobe after working with me, but what they also get is renewed confidence, a belief that they are worthy and deserving of great style in THIS body and at THAT size, no matter what it was and how far away it is from what they used to consider their ideal.
This is a huge market differentiator for me. No one is talking about the intersections between style, image, mindset and confidence the way I do, and bringing it to life for women. So much of the fashion industry seeks to tear women down. All of the messaging revolves around changing yourself to fit into the clothes whereas my methods equip women to face the day with a true belief that their bodies are capable and no less worthy of great style than their smaller or younger counterparts. The clothes fit onto your body; you don’t have to fit into the clothes.
I specialize in fit. I’m trained by Stacy London of tv’s What Not to Wear, and my own methodology takes into account the mindset and how we overcome limiting beliefs about our bodies, size, style, and also educates women on their body shapes and how to dress them. No fruits here – I provide clear-cut, easy-to-understand guidelines on the best silhouettes for tops, bottoms, dresses, and all types of clothing.
Confidence comes from understanding WHY something looks good on you, not having a stylist tell you it looks good. You have to feel good in it, and that feeling comes in large part from your brain understanding what works and why.
Otherwise, it feels like a fluke, and every time you go to get dressed, you’re worried you won’t be able to repeat it. That’s not the case when my clients work with me.
I had a client tell me that getting dressed is now the easiest part of her day. Another said she is ready to slay dragons each day after working with me. That makes me proud. Because a confident woman is capable of a great many things.
Understanding how clothing is supposed to fit your body at any size is life-changing. From there, we layer on style. How do you want to look and feel everyday? How do you want to walk into a room or any setting no matter how casual or formal?
I help you define that and then source the clothes to match your vibe and energy.
We follow a process of an in-depth analysis of your body shape, style recommendations, editing your closet to make room for new pieces that work with your lifestyle, and then personal shopping, where I shop for you in a VIP experience. My clients are busy – they don’t have time or interest in watching me shop and traipsing around the mall. They arrive, are quickly ushered to a VIP dressing room, we try on my selections, they purchase what they want, and they’re dazzled each time by how effortless the process is and how much they love their new looks.
I also offer virtual options for maintenance or special events like vacations, travel packing, work trips and galas. They can shop through a curated selection of clothes I’ve picked out for them, order them directly to their homes, and try them on in a virtual fitting with me for real-time feedback. Some clients love this option for their shopping experience.
I provide transformational experiences for women to more courageously, confidently and powerfully step into the next chapter of who they’re becoming, with so much authenticity and heart.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Absolutely. As you might imagine, all of a sudden, the majority of my clients stopped buying professional clothes. They weren’t going into offices, they weren’t spending money on clothes and were staying inside. Retailers were floundering, trying to adapt with more and more loungewear options. I had to think about what my client needed. My saving grace is that I have always encouraged my clients to be themselves.
It turns out I had quite a few clients who didn’t feel like themselves in a t-shirt on zoom. Sure, they might wear casual bottoms, but they wanted a smart and stylish blouse or button-down on top.
Many of my clients gained weight that I dubbed “pandemic pounds”. So they were navigating more casual expectations for clothes, plus weight gain, which left many of them feeling sloppy and unrefined. They wanted to embrace more casual options but done in a way where they still felt put together. My experience with body shape and fit was a lifeline for them. They could adjust the way they dressed without sacrificing style or spiraling and feeling bad about their gained weight.
Fit always comes first, it doesn’t matter if you’re in joggers or a suit, I guarantee there are certain silhouettes and cuts that you look better in with both.
I have a private, free Facebook community and I went live every single Friday for about 6 months at the height of the pandemic. I provided trainings on style and fit, mindset, trend reports, and how-tos, and held space for my community to work through this time and how it was affecting their style and their lives. That’s the thing about my business ethos – we work with the whole person. Many of my community members were dealing with having to share space with their partners and children, all at work and school inside the home. They were burnt out, and having a fun, uplifting place to come and talk about style and learn about what type of shorts are best for your body shape was just what they needed.
I also launched a live workshop called “Crush Your Cart: How to shop online and get a cart full of winners”. With so many of us needing to shop online during the pandemic, folks were struggling with scrolling through hundreds and thousands of items, unclear on how to figure out if something would look good on them based on the picture or seeing it on the 5’9″ model who likely has a different body shape and size than they do.
The workshop was a great success. I enrolled 49 students! And they raved about how these lessons helped them shop better online and in person.
Overall, the lesson from the pandemic was to continue to listen to your customer. Don’t fight where they are. Really listen to what they’re going through and come up with aligned solutions to the problems they have. When things get back to whatever the new normal is, they’ll remember your help in a time of uncertainty and it creates brand loyalty.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brandeisnicole.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/brandeisnicole
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/styleforsmartcookies
- Twitter: twitter.com/brandeisnicole
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmhE9QN55ckLdXrfWNWc2aQ?sub_confirmation=1
