Enter a day in the life of a Lifestyle Manager, a unique but nuanced job finding a new set of audiences in India. Lavinia Sootinck, a young and enthusiastic Lifestyle Manager at Pinch can be likened to an indispensable co-pilot to her customers, navigating the intricacies of their households with care and expertise. Amidst hundreds of apps, gadgets, and tech-led solutions, she provides much-needed human expediency. She and many other Lifestyle Managers at Pinch curate myriad experiences for their customers every single day. One day, she is pulling together a heartwarming 40th birthday celebration, curating a bespoke wine-tasting soiree, and the next day, she is facilitating safe transportation and comprehensive medical check-ups for another client’s elderly parents. Her role in the customer’s life is pretty interesting. On one hand, she is the genie that takes care of their said and unsaid needs and on the other hand, her meticulous and reliable coordination with the house helps, ensures everyday tasks at her customer’s place run smoothly. As a true extension of the customer’s family, she understands their life’s complexities and focuses on making it comfortable and worthwhile for them.
Lavinia is one of the many Lifestyle Managers at Pinch. This Gurgaon-based home and lifestyle management company is providing support and solutions to families, enabling them to seamlessly manage their homes so that they can live a joyful and distraction-free life filled with purpose and meaning. Already popular in the West and an upcoming concept in India, Pinch, through talented Lifestyle Managers like Lavinia, is striving to make homes a place of belonging, comfort, and peace. Name any task, however big or small, and she is there to take care of it. Whether it's connecting with and supporting the Home Cooks for the daily menu planning or preempting unique requirements from customers like an Airport Concierge for their business travels, she invests time in understanding every request, utilizing her existing knowledge, and continuously learning new skills to create more and more value in the customer’s life.
Lifestyle Managers like Lavinia handle a broad range of lifestyle requirements, from the most basic to the most complex - arranging at-home gatherings and running daily errands to making monthly bill payments for her customers. Training Househelps to become more skilled and efficient is among Pinch’s other offerings. It has so far started its services in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi NCR, and Pune.
One of the prerequisites for this emerging role of a Lifestyle Manager is empathy, being able to put oneself in the customer’s shoes and help make their life more joyful. Then come multi-tasking and attention to detail. A year into this role, working with different families, Lavinia now ensures her customers can spend time building meaningful relationships and creating lasting memories, without worrying about the micro-stressors in their lives -- the tiny bouts of anxiety caused by everyday things which accumulate over time and affect the physical and mental well-being of individuals.
“Every day as a Lifestyle Manager, I get to learn something new and grow as a person. It is incredibly fulfilling to be able to help people and know that my efforts contribute to their well-being,” says 28-year-old Lavinia. She is based in Bengaluru and has a Bachelor's in Arts from Mount Carmel College. Whenever a customer of Pinch needs to put their home in structure, she comes to their rescue.
“A Lifestyle Manager has different clients, in different fields and with different life experiences. That is an opportunity in itself, to be able to expand one’s knowledge continuously. This person who might be in their 20s or 30s is exposing themselves to their thought process,” says the company’s Chief Business Officer, Ravi Bansal.
The Lifestyle Managers begin their journey by first understanding the customers and immersing themselves in their day-to-day routine. They then familiarise themselves with the customer’s home setting and the pressing problems they have been facing. The service is then personalised for each customer, according to their lifestyle and the pain points they face in their daily lives.
Pinch, with its Lifestyle Managers and reliable suite of home services, not only provides structure to homes but also supports customers in focusing on their personal growth and well-being. They set out to create a loving environment not just for the customers but also for the people who serve them.
Each time, the requests that drop by are unique and diverse like arranging weekend yoga sessions at home or purchasing a wooden bookshelf and delivering them to the customer. Lavinia says, “Being able to think quickly and find solutions that perfectly fit the customer’s request is crucial when we get a new genre of request entirely. And these are also the things that make this job all the more exciting.”
By availing the services of a company like Pinch, customers get access to an ecosystem that solves their problems. The company’s founder Nitin Mohan Srivastava says, “Answers to the most complex questions already exist. What’s challenging is getting answers that are the most appropriate for you. At Pinch, we strive to get these answers and solve your problems through expertise and ingenuity. We do what is right for you and not what is easy for us.”