Alison Lumbatis Left Engineering to Style 100,000 Women

Alison Lumbatis spent her early career as a telecom engineer, a long way from fashion. She started blogging about style in 2012 as a side project while working from home, and the audience it built organically over the following year convinced her there was a real business underneath it. In 2014, she left her corporate job and launched Outfit Formulas, a personal styling program that sends women capsule-wardrobe plans, shopping lists, and daily outfit formulas by email and app — trading a corporate paycheck for the harder, less-taught problem of figuring out how to pay herself from her own business.

Her core bet is that style is teachable, not innate — a direct rebuttal to the idea that some women are just “naturally” put-together and others aren’t. As she’s put it in an interview with CanvasRebel: “Style is a skill that anyone can learn. You don’t have to be naturally gifted with it.”

The business has grown almost entirely on that premise, reaching more than 100,000 women across 20 countries. It wasn’t a straight line — when the pandemic hit, Outfit Formulas took an initial 50% hit in sales, the kind of drop that ends a lot of small businesses. Instead, Lumbatis used the disruption to rework the program, and came out the other side with 10% growth for the year. She’s since become a best-selling author, extending the same formula-based approach to a book.

The other half of her pitch is just as direct: “Every woman deserves to dress the body she has right now” — not the body she used to have, or the one she’s working toward. It’s a small reframe that’s carried an entire company: turning “I don’t know how to dress myself” into a solvable, teachable problem, one formula at a time.