Christine: Nikiel: Makeover guru knows value of creating the right image

Jackie O'Fee is aiming for 15 stores by 2012. Shows like How to Look Good Naked have helped business. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

Jackie O'Fee is not one to sugar-coat her advice. If that skirt makes your bum look big or your tie is wrong for that suit she'll tell you - but only because that's her job. The founder and director of image consultant Signature Style spends her days advising the sartorially challenged, but says she and business partner Jody Blackwood have never reduced clients to tears a la tough-love style mavens Trinny and Susannah, of reality TV series What Not To Wear.

O'Fee set up the company nine years ago, aiming to provide a fresh approach to the makeover market. She's now a well-known style guru with 3800 clients on her database and has worked hard to broker marketing deals with the likes of film distributor Roadshow Entertainment, loyalty programme Fly Buys and Hawkes Bay's Mission Estate Winery.

She's also nabbed several prime-time TV spots, including a makeover of MPs Sue Bradford and Tariana Turia and former United Future MP Judy Turner on TVNZ's current affairs show Close Up, and as co-host of TV3's makeover show Does My Bum Look Big?

Profile counts in this business and branding is O'Fee's biggest cost. Fortunately she's "not shy".

Roadshow Entertainment approached her with an offer to put her company's logo on all 50,000 Sex and the City movie DVDs it distributed from October to January. The logo was also on every point-of-sale poster and the TV ads, and the company had a flyer inside each DVD. O'Fee reckons the advertising was worth about $40,000 and not something the business could have afforded itself. While the deal didn't net as much business as she'd hoped - "nobody's splashing much cash around at the moment" - during the promotion period the company's website hits rocketed up to about 2500 a month from an average of 500 a month.

O'Fee aligns her business with others that can boost the brand and it generally works both ways. Dating agency Fresh Start regularly sends clients for a 15-minute Signature Style presentation on dress, and she has a relationship with an award-winning Auckland hairdresser.

She and Blackwood also contract a makeup artist.

While for some people clothes don't maketh the man or the woman, O'Fee's clients say dress matters, especially in the corporate world where looking professional could mean the difference between winning or losing business.

Carole Pedder, a partner with accounting firm Withers Tsang, says O'Fee's dress code presentation made staff consider how they looked to other people, and most staff, "most noticeably the men", smartened up afterwards.

Whether you like it or not, people judge others by the way they dress, she says. "When I started working, no way would you have had a huge amount of cleavage showing. You had your work clothes and you had your going out clothes. Now there's no difference. If someone were to have a tattoo and a leather jacket you might not want to invest your money with them, even though they can do the job."

Signature Style guides people on how to dress appropriately for what they're doing, says Pedder.

There's a misconception that only people who "haven't got a clue" need to go to a stylist, says O'Fee. While some clients "don't have a clue and realise that", others do know what they're doing but just want reassurance they're doing it right.

A former regional sales manager for Vodafone, O'Fee became what she calls a "fairy godmother" to earn cash for a trip to Italy in her early 20s. While doing colours for a hairdresser friend she realised she enjoyed it more than selling cellphones, so on returning from Italy she set up Signature Style. Business didn't take off immediately and she had "no income" for the first few years and worked part-time in newspaper advertising sales.

However, after a "severe boot up the bum" from a friend who told her to get a real job because she'd never make any money, an outraged O'Fee pursued business more aggressively.

Word got around and customer numbers increased, but O'Fee realised her offerings were too one-off. To keep people coming back she invented a series of sessions, such as the nine-session Rolls Royce style makeover ending in a glamour fashion shoot.

And not everything went according to plan. Her wardrobe planning tool, a seasonal advice guide to be sold through the website, failed to fire, and she sold two out of 1000 that were made "at great cost". Customers found the tool too complex, but rather than dump the idea, O'Fee has incorporated it as part of a bigger service.

In the small image consulting industry, competition is also an issue, she says. She's had a staff member set up in opposition to her, but claims that the popularity of the TV makeover shows has created the biggest challenge: the impression that what she does is easy.

O'Fee, who did a series of short courses in her early 20s on colours, body shape analysis, makeup and how put together a wardrobe, says that while the likes of Trinny and Susannah and Gok Wan have been "fabulous for the industry", there are a lot of what she calls "spare room" businesses, or "women who've seen the TV show, read the book, taken their girlfriend shopping and set up business but they don't know enough about colour and body shape analysis".

Men are the untapped market; about 90 per cent of O'Fee's clients are women. The men who do come - one a week on average - are quite open to the idea of improving their image, she says, "once they see there's a methodology to it".

Most clients are Aucklanders but some come from as far away as Hawkes Bay and even Dunedin. O'Fee plans to expand to Christchurch and by 2012 wants to have 15 stores in New Zealand and Australia and 45 stylists.