Karina Bruce is helping women dress for success in work and life 

Karina, what exactly is Dress for Success?

We look to assist any woman who is unemployed or underemployed that we want to support into employment. We have women who have come from a domestic violence situation, or mums that have been really lost in terms of their journey back to the workforce. No doubt you’ve seen the stats around the rise of homelessness in women over 55, so we help women of that age who been displaced. My role is to look at how we can transition these women into the workforce, and how do we partner with organisations that would benefit from their longevity of tenure and experience.

We dress a whole range of women, but it doesn’t stop there. I like to say it’s more than the dress. A lot of these women are fragile and anxious. One woman rang but said she had to wait for a styling appointment until the bruising on her face had gone down. I said we can do it when you’re comfortable in a fortnight, or you can come in now and there will be no judgement. Another lady was living in her car, but she wanted something to wear to her son’s graduation.

Whatever journey the woman’s on, we will meet them where they’re at and help them through that journey. The principle and the fundamental mission and goal is to be able to help them gain employment because we know once they’re employed, they’ve got structure, they’ve got purpose, they’ve got money, and that can create generational impact, and a flow-on effect.

If we can start by styling and getting them to feel confident from within, we can build programs around that and ask about whether they have a CV, have they got a LinkedIn profile, can we do a mock interview for practice? Can we set them up with a mentor? It’s not about giving them an outfit and they leave. The first knock they get, they’re back to square one, so we need to hold hands.

How are you funded? How many women have you helped?

We have a range of funding. There are very generous donors, and we pitch for government grants. We partner with corporates. In terms of numbers, we helped 350 women in Victoria last year and I’m looking to double that this year – we’re well on our way.

Our staff is tiny. There’s me, and a three-day-a-week fundraising and events manager, Helen, and we’re about to appoint a new client services and operations supervisor. We also have a two-day-a-week marketing executive.

Karina, you come from a corporate fashion background. Is this the first time you’ve worked for a not-for-profit?

One hundred per cent. I grew up with parents that were very much around giving back, and I think that was ingrained in me from a small age. When I was probably late teens, end of high school, I used to deliver food to the disadvantaged. My parents used to drive me. It was a really beautiful experience, and I think that showed me that there’s more than one avenue to life. I’d been very fortunate and very blessed in my upbringing. That whole saying ‘To he whom a lot is given, a lot is expected’, I just love that because I think I’ve been very lucky in my life. I’ve got three beautiful kids, I have a wonderful husband, I’m healthy, I’m happy, and I think I should do anything I can to provide a little bit of that to someone less fortunate.

Throughout my career, I have inherently done things to support women, whether at Fernwood women’s health clubs, helping a very large woman become comfortable enough in the gym to get on a machine, or Country Road.

Or once, at Witchery, we built out a style program where we would help women by looking through what clothes worked best with their shape, or to overcome whatever barriers they had to their external appearance, helping them find their own style voice. One woman came in with her daughter who was on her phone and didn’t want to be there, was completely oblivious to her mum. The woman was probably in her mid to late forties and walked around refusing help when I asked if I could assist her. You could see the barriers were up.

She was wearing some jeans and a basic T-shirt, a bit dishevelled, and she went into the change rooms with a pair of jeans. I offered her a top to go with the jeans, just to see the full look, no pressure at all. I grabbed her a blazer as well. She came out of the change room and had the jeans, and the blazer, and she looked at herself in the mirror and she started crying. It was such a beautiful moment, and the daughter looked up and it was as though it was the first time she had seen her mother. She said, “Mum, you look really beautiful.” I get emotional every time I think of this story.

That was the power of fashion. That was the power of what fashion can deliver to a woman in that space – the confidence and to start saying “I’m worthy” from within.

So, fashion for confidence was a space you were familiar with before you joined Dressed for Success?

I used to have my own business, Hear Us Roar, around building opportunities for sizeable women to have fashion choices. Most conventional clothing stops at size 16. I had a career in – and still occasionally do – curve modelling. I was doing a runway show once and all the straight size models were walking in beautiful designer clothes and I was in three-quarter white capri pants and a white oversized shirt. In that moment, I thought: there has to be something better than this. My business ended up with 40 or so Australian and international designers, focusing on the curve shape and beautiful fabrics and prints.

It must have been so difficult to walk that runway, feeling what you were feeling yet having to smile the whole time.

One hundred per cent. You have to be, like, “I’m having a good time, I’m not feeling judged.” And that’s part of the whole confidence piece that I’m so passionate about because I know when you have a woman with confidence and genuine confidence from within, she shines in so many avenues of her life from her family life to the community to the fact that doors open. I think anything that I can do in that space to build up women, especially from a disadvantage perspective or inequality perspective, is hugely purposeful.

It sounds like you were on a 25-year road that could only lead to Dress for Success.

I’ve been on the road forever. I think it just took all of these experiences to come to fruition and go, this [corporate world] isn’t where I’m supposed to be. I had to gain the knowledge, experience and commercial lens to be able to deliver it to a not-for-profit, because not-for-profits have great ideas and great dreams but without the commercial infrastructure and the modelling behind it, it’s not sustainable.

I learned a lot, trying to get scale funding for Hear Us Roar. Under four per cent of women-led businesses get funded in Australia, and while I was looking for investors, I met some women who were further down the road in trying to develop their business, and they said to me, “We put down that we’re two women and a man when we’re pitching.” He didn’t exist: he just got them past that barrier for entry. I was too honest to do that, but it did bring into focus the barrier for entry. Over Christmas last year, I really dived into what do I want to do next? Where do I want to be? And then I got a call about Dress for Success. As we had discussions and I met the board, I felt like I was at home. I felt like this was where I’m supposed to be. It was almost like a light bulb moment, after all these experiences, this door opened and there was this shining light coming through and this is where I’m supposed to be.

More information

Dress for Success Victoria’s website here