Review: Amazon Prime Wardrobe Personal Shopper

One service to which you gain access as an Amazon Prime member is Prime Wardrobe. With Prime Wardrobe, you can select up to eight pieces of eligible clothing, shoes or accessories and have them shipped to you without your credit card being charged.  Once received, you have 7 days in which to try on the items and decide whether to keep them.  If you don't want them, you have a pre-paid return label to return them in the same package in which you received them.  Your card is only charged for the items you keep.


The service is great for allowing you to order/try multiple sizes of the same thing, or to let you really see if this shirt matches those pants.  The problem is that not all garments are eligible for Prime Wardrobe and Amazon leaves a lot to be desired as a fashion search engine.  Unless you have a lot of luck or are looking for something very basic or are searching for a particular brand/item name, it is hard to find things.  Broad parameters bring you thousands of results, but narrowing them too much can exclude too much.

One "in" thing right now is subscription style boxes.  Sign up for Dia &Co., Stitch Fix, Trunk Club, or many others and they will send you a box of clothing each month, supposedly personally selected for you on the basis of a survey you complete when signing up, plus  personal communication with the stylist. Some also claim to look at your Pinterest boards.  For this, they charge a "styling fee" that is usually in the $20 range, but which can be applied to the purchase of the clothing.  I've tried Dia & Co., and Nadine West.  Basically I found the Dia & Co. clothing to be too expensive for my budget (averaging over $60 per piece) and the Nadine West clothes to be reasonably priced (about $30 per piece), but repetitive and cheaply made, mostly of t-shirt type knits.  I will say that I do wear the pieces I bought and enjoy them.

Prime Wardrobe Personal Shopper is Amazon's answer to subscription style boxes.  For a fee of $4.99 per month (not applied to purchase), Amazon's computer (with supposedly a little help from a person) selects about twelve items for you to preview.  You are sent an email with a link to review them. You may select up to eight of Amazon's picks, or if you want to select a garment Amazon did not pick for you, as long as it is a Prime Wardrobe selection, you can do that too.  Also, many of the selected items come in multiple colors so you can choose to order the color Amazon selected, or another, or both.  The only limit is that you can select no more than eight items, and the total bill must be under $1,000.  Once you select which eight (or fewer) items you want to try, they are sent to you, and, once you receive them, you have seven days to return those you do not want.

Not me, photo from Amazon

I tried the service for the first time two months ago.  Out of the chosen items, I asked that four be sent to me. Two shirts did not fit/look good on me.  However, I kept a denim jacket ($29.99) and a shirt ($40.68 but it looks awesome on me and its black so I'll get a lot of wear out of it).

In order to personalize your box, Amazon has you complete a style survey and then it gives you a chance to review various fashion picks and vote yes or no.  You can do this as often as you want, so if you are sitting someplace waiting, instead of surfing Facebook you can review style picks.  Hopefully the computer has figured out by now that I do not like distressed jeans.

In order to access Prime Wardrobe Personal Shopper, you have to use the Amazon App--you can't access via their website.

It is fun getting surprises in the mail, even if you are paying for them, but in the long run, I did not think I was getting enough value from the styling services to make it worth the monthly fee.  Dia & Co.'s clothing was just overall too expensive, and I never felt like their stylists were picking clothes for me as opposed to a generic person.  I don't think Nadine West ever claimed to be picking for me, though they did pick up on the fact that I don't wear jewelery and quit sending it.

In general I found Amazon stayed in the price range I gave them and I was pleased with the items in my first order, so I tried again.  The second time around, I was not so pleased.  The home page has a place for you to leave a message for a stylist, and I told them "I need work clothes.  I'm 59 and work in a law office.  No jeans."  What I got were pairs of jeans, and one pair of work pants.  There was also an office-appropriate dress and some blouses along with a slouchy cardigan. I chose not to buy any, partly because nothing caught my eye and partly because the COVID-19 Stay-at-home orders were just coming out and frankly, I wasn't sure whether my husband and/or I was going to be out of work.

I just reviewed my third set of selections.   I asked them to send me five of the eight selections, though I changed color on one. Honestly I think that only two are likely to end up in my closet, but since I've already paid the fee, there is no downside to me to having them sent here for a try-on.

Photo from Amazon

If this shirt fits, it should look good on me and be something I get a lot of wear from. It's from Anne Klein and the price is $36.75.

Unless I'm going to court or meeting with a client, neither of which happen often, these are office-appropriate.

Photo from Amazon

This is cute, I just don't think I like it $44.00 worth.

For now, I'm not going to turn off the monthly fee for the Personal Shopper, though frankly I doubt there is much "personal" involved. I'm still in the process of losing weight and I'm at that awkward point where plus sizes are too big, especially tops, and misses sizes are a big tight, especially pants. Also with the whole COVID-19 thing, it is nice to have this stuff delivered to my door.

Have you tried any subscription boxes?  What did you think?  Have you tried Amazon Wardrobe Personal Shopper?