In short
- The catalogue has one agency in Capelle aan den IJssel: ONLY Model Management (Rivium Promenade 200, KVK 24436265).
- On the review site Vergelijk Modellenbureaus it has 17 reviews, all positive, with an average of 5.0.
- Several reviews of 9 and 10 January 2022 are written as replies to an anonymous negative review whose text we did not see.
ONLY Model Management
Capelle aan den IJssel borders Rotterdam on the east and lies in the province of South Holland. One of the 100 Dutch agencies in our catalogue is here. There is no licence for model agencies in the Netherlands, so the catalogue takes in every business that represents models, and the profiles say what we found.
ONLY Model Management works from Rivium Promenade 200, and its KVK number is 24436265. In the catalogue the agency has women's and men's boards. The main public source about it is its reviews.
What the reviews show
On the review site Vergelijk Modellenbureaus the agency has 17 reviews, all positive, with an average of 5.0. Several reviews of 9 and 10 January 2022 are written as replies to an anonymous negative review and defend the owner. We did not see the text of that negative review, so we do not know what it accused the agency of.
How should you read such a picture? Uniformly positive ratings say little: review sites are written by whoever chooses to write, and nobody checks whether the author worked with the agency. Several defensive reviews appearing within two days show only that the criticism drew a response; that proves neither fault nor innocence. It is more useful to ask the agency itself: which clients it worked with in the past year, whether you may talk to two of its models, and whether you may take the contract home to read.
What can be checked better than reviews
- The company. You can enter KVK number 24436265 in the Chamber of Commerce search free of charge and see under what name and address the business is registered.
- The money. No law or association sets the commission in the Netherlands. The police's yardstick is plain: the agency should advance the cost of the first photo session and not ask you for it up front.
- The contract. It has to state the commission percentage, the length of the exclusivity and how it can be ended. In the first three years of a voluntary reporting point, about half of more than 120 reports concerned unclear contract arrangements or unpaid invoices.
Rotterdam and other markets
Neighbouring Rotterdam has four agencies in the catalogue: Rule Model Management, The Force Models, Editorial Model Management and the commercial agency The Specials. The country's main market is Amsterdam, with 50 agencies, and the general rules are in the guide Modeling agencies in the Netherlands. Plain digitals are enough to apply to any of them.
If an unknown "scout" wrote to you in the name of ONLY Model Management or any other agency, check the contact by phoning the office. The police warn about fake scouts and fake photographers online and point out that agencies never try models out over a webcam; that is one of the clearest signs of a modeling scam.