What is lifestyle entrepreneurship?

Lifestyle entrepreneurship is making waves today than ever before – by celebs no less than Gwyneth Paltrow and Blake Lively. These Hollywood A Listers love telling people what to wear, how to decorate and what to eat ‘clean’. It has become a fad but it is also raking in the money for blogs such as Goop by Gwynnie. Lively shut her blog Preserve down recently but has promised to be back with another lifestyle product.

But for thousands of other everyday but talented men and women, lifestyle blogs are making good business sense, enabling those who have been able to share their lifestyle expertise with the world, become successful entrepreneurs in the process.

Today, entrepreneurs who have established their businesses on unique ideas and concepts drive the world of business. How is this made possible? Information of course and yes technology. Technology is a great asset to business owners, particularly women, who can promote great entrepreneurship ideas online. Most of today’s trending lifestyle blogs are based online and dispense advise on everything from décor to juicing.

Lifestyle entrepreneurship in fact goes beyond the mere lifestyle blog or the online shop. It is in fact promoting a certain concept in relation to the ideal lifestyle most want to pursue. It is all about making choices, deliberate ones, choosing to live in a certain way that would compliment your style, your personality and who you are. In a nutshell, entrepreneurship that relies on living right, making smart moves and in the process, making the most of it.

It is also about smart ideas – in a society that is widely driven by specific choices and preferences. A decade ago, the categories were pure and simple – today, they are complex beyond belief. They are also sub divided and categorized in a way that allows you to become a mini expert in your own micro field.

The most powerful appeal in lifestyle entrepreneurship is that you are living the kind of life you want others to emulate – it is less about getting dressed and going to work every day and more about planning your day around the needs that stem from a pursuit of a specific and identified lifestyle. 

Smart entrepreneurs 
Smart entrepreneurs know where and how to plug the lifestyle bug. Among the keyboard warriors, campaigners, artistes and do gooders are many who dream of someday scenarios and one day I will visions. They wish they could pursue the lifestyle but they need to be guided. There are others who wish they could make the right choices but are not able to do so, for some reason. They want someone to point something out to them and say, that’s the right colour, the right choice and they would happily catch on. Lifestyle entrepreneurship mostly caters to people who, for some reason, need to have things recommended and chosen for them, which of course forms a brilliant opportunity for those who have the talent, the capacity and the ability to turn out curated, planned and well-executed lifestyle options that others can wow about.

In an increasingly complex world of specialized services, lifestyle entrepreneurs market everything from thinking positive to dressing right, developing style, mastering oneself and everything else in between. They meet the needs of people who are too busy to dream up solutions themselves. They have built their businesses on helping others to figure out their needs and meet them successfully.
The lifestyle entrepreneurship concept is more appealing to women -  often dealing with low morale issues, stress in managing a family and work, unable to make informed choices on dressing, etc., – these situations place women in vulnerable positions that coaching in lifestyle entrepreneurship can easily deliver them out of. 

Yet in a way, the lifestyle entrepreneurs are meeting needs that are real and alive. They are helping people to make the right choices, discover themselves and turning themselves around into doing things better. In our self obsessed world of perfection, everything from achieving perfect eyebrows to making an entire wardrobe change or sitting down with a cuppa to alter your mood, anything goes. 
We have grown so used to having experts tell us what to do that the world has come to rely on an expert to make all the decisions. Lifestyle coaching replaces the advice of aunties and close friends that used to be freely dispensed a generation ago. It also fills a vacuum for those who find they do not have anyone to rely upon for right opinions and advice.

It is also a concept cherished mostly by millennials who are driven by agendas that are vastly different from those of their parents or others before them. It is also a concept that works well for them and their priorities.

Lifestyle entrepreneurs are there when they are needed – and not around when not needed, which works fine for those who want their lives to be uncluttered and well planned, just like the lifestyle tips delivered by the expert. 

(Nayomini Weerasooriya, a senior journalist, writer and a PR professional, can be contacted at [email protected])