Story Models - on a mission to reinvent the way freelance models & clients connect
by Startacus Admin
Story Models are on a mission to reinvent the way models and clients connect and interact...
Providing an online marketplace matching freelance models with clients - and vice versa, the platform is aiming to disrupt the more costly traditional modelling agency business model and also, the very much hit and miss ‘searching on social media’ to find modelling talent.
Whilst still offering some of the characteristics of a traditional modelling agency, Story Models, offer brands low commissions, end-to-end management and direct access to professional models, with a 10% fee charged on top of the final booking price.
With the online platform now 4 weeks into ‘live’ operations, we were intrigued to find out a little more about the Story Models team, about their journey to date, and any plans to further disrupt the modelling space going forward...
Greg Keegan, CEO of Story Models shared all with Startacus:
"Story Models was born off the back of a problem that both me and my co-founder Zoe were having. Zoe was looking for professional freelance modelling gigs (after years at various agencies) to give her more flexibility but couldn’t find a platform that provided this service. As a photographer, I started looking for models on 
Instagram as working with agencies was slow, expensive and it felt like the terms suited them, not me. Agencies currently take 30 - 40% of a model's wages and take 3 months on average to pay them. Client pay around 20% commission and pulling a job together can be time consuming. We want to get the time it takes to book models from 2 days down to 2 hours. We’re also only charging models and clients 10% for the service.
Story Models was born in Oct 2016. We were invited to Ignite Accelerator to help us shape the product and make sure we had the best possible chance of success. After launching 4 weeks ago, we have signed up 60 models and 40 clients. Our models base is experienced and hungry for freelance work. Our clients are mostly emerging brands who want more control over their bookings and who want their budget to stretch a little further.
Our future plan are ambitious. We’re going to be looking at model data (once we have the volume) and the future of the company will involve AI led suggestions to help clients find the right model for their brand, demographic and industry. We want to be more than intuition based, we want to provide the real data."
If you are interested by Story Models, make sure to visit their site and read more about their journey to date via this medium blog post. We wish Greg and Zoe all the best with their endeavours.
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Published on: 13th March 2017
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