FabJob Guide to Become a Personal Shopper

by Laura Harrison McBride, Peter J. Gallanis, Tag Goulet

Personal shoppers are hired to shop for gifts, fashions, and other items for busy people. Some personal shoppers are employed by boutiques or department stores to assist the stores customers. Others are hired to shop for individuals or corporate clients. As a personal shopper your work may range from buying birthday presents to finding the perfect promotional item for a company to give to important clients. The book offers advice on how to learn the skills needed to get hired as a personal shopper, including identifying what clients want, finding the best products, and arranging for purchases. You will also learn how to get discounts on merchandise and prevent purchasing disasters. The guide explains how to get hired as a personal shopper by a boutique, department store, or shopping center. You will learn how to find job openings, prepare a resume, and do well in an interview. The guide also gives step-by-step information on how to start a personal shopping business, including how to get clients and how much to charge. The CD-ROM that comes with the book includes many helpful samples that can be used in a personal shopping business. Visit FabJob.com for career guides. This book is now a textbook for the International Association of Professions Career College. Personal Shopper Certificate Courses are available from the publisher's website.

216 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

Possibly the weirdest thing about being an author is the research--especially when it turns up Eleanor of Aquitaine as one's 23rd great-grandmother. I'm also descended from a Tunisian who married a Spanish princess during the Crusades. And I can count among my ancestors a bunch of Brits who descended upon Providence, Rhode Island, in the early days of the colonies, and brought their incredibly fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren beliefs with them. Nonetheless, the grandfather who contributed that DNA to my mix was a first-class rascal, having been expelled from Albany Business College about 1901 for overturning an outhouse. He later went on to create a milk co-op in New York State that protected farmers' income for decades until corporate conglomerates dismantled it in court in the late 1980s. He was dead by then, thank goodness, or I expect he'd have had something to say about it.

I'm quite proud of my late quietly crusading accountant grandfather; I'm quite amazed by my genetic connection to European royalty. I'm proud of my First Place Virginia Press Association awards, but possibly more fond of my ribbons for riding my beloved horse, the late Major Yeats, over fences.

But I'm still just a kid born in Brooklyn, NY, to ordinary working parents. And that's the person who writes the snarky cozy mysteries featuring shelf Barker, a Brit with an Italian-American wife, and a large dose of attitude.

Aside from that, Granny Eleanor might be quite proud of some of my achievements, not least of which is having a "day job" for only about five years of my adult life, spending the rest freelancing. She might approve my love of horses and dogs and fine cuisine; not sure she'd approve of my liberal politics. But my rascally humanitarian grandfather clearly would...even though he was a lifelong Republican.

So here I am: a Brooklyn-born bundle of extreme contradictions. I love the Anglican Church for its beautiful music and liturgy, not to mention a number of lovely piles of rocks and stained-glass. But I follow a more shamanic path myself. I treasure America's energy, but I live in the EU where the pace is more measured. I love the idea of travel, but rarely set foot on an airplane. (OK, that has more to do with the misery of flight these days, and a soupcon of terror.) I'd love to be a vegetarian for spiritual reasons, but...do mussels come in vegetable form?

You can think Shelf Barker is my alter ego if you wish, or wait until the beginning of the new year and see if the heroine of the second series of mystery novels is more like me than the fictional man named Graham Barker (no middle name because of his Trotskyite parents), but called Shelf. Or maybe none of the above.

Let me know.

Thanks.