Blonde Ambition

  Rag Trade Heiress

  Everything she touches has rust on it

  Nick Jacenko

  IT APPEARED TO her many social media fans, the starry-eyed public relations students who, when asked to name a public relations agency, could name only one—Sweaty Betty—that Roxy was born fully formed, master of her own destiny and dressed in Sass & Bide black ‘Rats’ leggings, a power blazer and ballet flats, complete with a power quiff, aged 20-something.

  Media archives draw a virtual blank before 2004, the year she established Sweaty Betty, and Roxy never volunteered much about her family. The facts were that she was born Roxy Elise Davis-Jacenko on 8 June 1980 in Sydney. Her parents, Nikola Jacenko and Doreen Davis-Jacenko, were rag traders who were on their way to building a multi-million-dollar fortune from scratch after knowing poverty as children.

  Roxy was the first child of Nick’s second marriage, something his daughter rarely spoke about. Her father had been born in a refugee shelter in Belgrade, Serbia, then Yugoslavia, in 1949. The Lonely Planet website describes Belgrade as a city of ‘gritty exuberance’—the description could aptly be used to describe Roxy. At age two, Nick immigrated to Australia with his family, parents Dusan and Vera, and three young siblings. The family’s first Australian home would be a garage behind an aged terrace house in Chalmers Street, Redfern. Their second, Nick would recall years later, was even less salubrious—a tent in North Ryde.

  With her family still growing in number, Nick’s plucky mother took herself to parliament in the early 1950s to protest the slow speed at which government-assisted housing was being built in Australia. The net result was the family of six was permitted to move into a tent pitched on the site of their future government-subsidised home at 6 Folkard Street, North Ryde. When the house was finished, Nick was off to nearby Coxs Road Primary School and later North Ryde High.

  Vera Jacenko worked day and night as a presser and machinist to make ends meet for the Jacenko clan. By age eleven, Nick was spending his Saturdays ironing garments at his mother’s workplace. She worked a number of jobs at clothing shops including Delta in Gladesville, Eclipse on Oxford Street and the legendary Darlinghurst men’s tailor and clothier Zink & Sons, which still stands after 120-plus years.

  At sixteen, Nick had found work as an apprentice cutter in the Sydney rag trade district of Surry Hills. His first job was at Marco, a men’s clothing company in St Leonards. He worked as a junior cutter making $20 per week. His next job at Three Star in the city would bring him into contact with senior cutter Denis Graham, with whom he would later form a business alliance. At age eighteen, about 1967, he would join Graham at AS Najar, a clothing business owned and run by three generations of proud Lebanese clothiers. Nick would learn his trade from an Australian legend, though one better known for his racetrack heroics than clothing manufacturing. Alf Najar is remembered as one of the early legends of the Bathurst Mount Panorama Grand Prix. In 1946 he set a record for the first post-war Australian Hill Climb Championship and went on to win the NSW Grand Prix at Bathurst that year and finish sixth in the 1947 Australian Grand Prix at Bathurst. With a passion for speed and adventure, Najar would go on to pioneer the sport of water skiing in Australia.

  He was equally competitive away from sport. He and his family ran a hugely successful clothing manufacturing business, which trained some of Sydney’s best young cutters. Alongside Nick at the cutting table in the Najar factory in Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills were ‘boy’ apprentices including the equally tenacious and talented George Spyrou, who would years later be described as the ‘godfather of fashion’ with fashion labels GS and George, and the future film costumier Nicholas Huxley, who in 1989 was nominated for an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Costume Design for the sci-fi film Sons of Steel. Denis Graham would later become known for his label Love Love, launched in 1980.

  Nick quickly earned a reputation as being one of the best cutters on the floor. ‘Nick was an exceptional cutter,’ said one long-time textiles associate.

  He was so good, he started to get contract work quite young. It was a time when it mattered a great deal to people in the trade how much fabric you could save when cutting patterns from one-and-a-half metres. If you couldn’t use every piece of the cloth, you were wasting money and had no future as a cutter.

  Following a discussion with Alf’s son Stanton, Nick and Denis Graham went into business. An order from Tom Tsipris, the founder, in 1972, of General Pants, saw the young men on their way. ‘Tom gave us an order for three styles—300 pieces. We thought we’d won the lottery,’ Nick would recall.

  The business, Zand, was born. The young men’s designer garments would soon be stocked in Sportsgirl and major boutiques nationally.

  It was while working at Zand’s Campbell Street, Surry Hills outlet years later that Nick met his future wife Doreen Anna Davis, a customer—and a tough one at that.

  Doreen, also born in 1949 according to company titles, had migrated to Australia after being raised in the East London borough of Hackney and growing up against the backdrop of social chaos and ethnic tension. As the cultural revolution of the swinging sixties reshaped Britain and the world, Doreen packed her bags and flew to Australia in search of warmer climes, a brighter future and a husband.

  While Nick was Russian Orthodox, Doreen, by virtue of her Lithuanian roots, was Jewish. Many Jewish Lithuanians fled the Baltic state when it was annexed in 1940 by its neighbour Soviet Russia after first being occupied by Nazi Germany, driving migration. Doreen’s father, Mani, would do his part as a bomb shelter warden in the family’s adopted Britain. Like Nick, Doreen’s parents had also been rag traders. Mani was a tailor and Doreen’s mother, Minnie, a seamstress. Displaying a rebellious streak, Doreen arrived on a travel visa and, after overstaying it, would seek Australian citizenship during a government amnesty.

  After first embarking on a career in the second-hand furniture business with a boyfriend who made the trip to Australia with her, Doreen would decide to open a boutique. A partner, Valmae Forman, would join her and the pair would open a second shop, Smack, in Parramatta.

  Those who knew Doreen at the time say she was a determined woman who was shrewd and could be uncompromising. Roxy would agree years later, describing her mother as ‘the smartest woman’. She was, above all, a hard worker, driven to make a dollar.

  With Doreen in need of stock for her fashion store in the newly opened Centrepoint Tower, then one of the most glamorous fashion precincts in the country, she soon found herself on Nick Jacenko’s doorstep at Zand. She had been having issues with a salesman and was looking for the owner of the business to resolve her problems. Sparks were quickly flying between the two. Nick, then married with two young children, Shawn and Tracy, would divorce first wife Sandra and marry Doreen within two years.

  Nick’s first family would soon become a source of tension in his new marriage. Years later, following his divorce from Doreen, Nick would claim Doreen had been ‘obsessed’ with the idea his first wife may make a claim on the couple’s hard-earned wealth and take it from them. Nick’s divorce from Sandra had been a difficult business.

  He suspects his daughter Roxy, only four years younger than her half-sister Tracy, as a child picked up on her mother’s ‘intense paranoia’ that Sandra, Shawn and Tracy would win Nick back. Doreen and the primary-school-aged Roxy, he believes, took action to further isolate him from his first family—such as not passing on phone messages—effectively cutting them off. In later years he would say he harboured regrets about turning his back on his first family and virtually dropping out of their lives. Doreen never warmed to his older children.

  Roxy’s older half-siblings, who she rarely talked about, would come to know their half-sister via social coverage in newspaper columns and her appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice. Shawn, born in 1974, would become a roofer and later a project manager on Sydney’s northern beaches—well away from Roxy’s social orbit. Sister Tracy, born in 1976, would, like her brother, grow up wi
th her mother’s maiden name and a curiosity about the father and younger half-sisters she hardly knew. Nick and Doreen were married around 1978—a boom period in fashion retail in Australia. Franchise stores like Katies and Sussan were doing a roaring trade and the newly married Jacenkos would soon consolidate their wholesale and retail businesses. Nick would start a new label for his wife, Tucker and Mason, and following Roxy’s birth in 1980, they would jointly open Capitol Clothing in 1987 after winding up Zand.

  ‘Nick basically became the production manager while Doreen became the business manager of the operation. They made quite a pair,’ a rag trade veteran recalled. ‘She was a very difficult woman, tough, but a good businesswoman. She would beat you down and down and down on price, driving the hardest bargain when buying supplies, but she would always pay the agreed price. She was tough but honourable.’

  ‘What the couple achieved they achieved with sweat and hard work. Nobody gave them nothing. They had nothing when they started,’ a former rag trader said.

  Committed to their dream of building a fashion empire and putting their government-housing childhoods behind them, Nick and Doreen thrived financially together. The couple would expand their business to eliminate the need to deal with smaller boutiques prone to missing payment deadlines and directly supply the fashion chains of larger public companies.

  Clients would soon include Katies, Rockmans, Noni B and Zara Garments. Capitol Clothing would grow to become one of the top clothing suppliers in Australia and be among the top 10 per cent of businesses in its sector. A dated business profile states the company’s annual turnover was $13 million. Nick was listed as director and managing director of Capitol Clothing while Doreen took the role of director and company secretary. They were fifty-fifty partners on paper but Nick would claim years later it was he who drove the expansion of the couple’s property portfolio to attain greater wealth. Doreen would travel the world—Paris, London—buying samples for the couple’s fashion business.

  At nineteen, Nick said, he was listening keenly when an old evening wear manufacturer gave him some advice about building wealth: ‘It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.’

  ‘I concluded that the simplest way to keep the money is to invest in property. I’ve applied this principle my while life.’

  Nick had a passion for buying older properties, renovating them and selling them for profit. He started in Annandale and then in Sydney’s coastal suburbs of Clovelly and Dover Heights. ‘He loved building. Nick was quite creative and loved seeing a thing in construction. Once built, it was less interesting,’ said one close friend.

  After her birth in 1980, Roxy would be taken home from hospital to a terrace Nick and Doreen owned at 45 Church Street, Randwick. Shortly after, the family would exchange Randwick’s working-class streets for one of Sydney’s most prestigious harbourside suburbs, Vaucluse, and a new home at 71 Vaucluse Road.

  Roxy’s earliest memories were of being on the move. A home in Hunters Hill became a favourite childhood haven and was associated with happy memories. ‘As a young family we moved around a lot,’ she told Fairfax Media. ‘My parents were big investors so were always on the lookout for the next project. It was a home life of: see a great property, buy, renovate or rebuild, live in it momentarily, then sell and move to the next.

  I would say my time in Hunters Hill [in Sydney] is probably the most memorable as it was a home in which we lived for the longest period of time. With it being waterfront, I used to spend my afternoons after school and weekends waiting for the tide to go out so I could go looking for little crabs under rocks for hours on end.

  The lavish home built on two titles was designed and built by architect Johann Wuhrer in the modern minimalist style. For the first decade of her life, Roxy, still an only child, would rattle around in the large house.

  Though Roxy herself was Jewish, she and her mother were not regulars at synagogue. Her father could only recall them attending synagogue once—and her mother lighting the menorah candles just ‘a handful of times’ in almost four decades. Nick never converted. Doreen’s faith was not, during their 37-year marriage, a priority.

  By age three, Roxy would relate to Jane Cadzow in her telling interview with Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend in 2013, she wore glasses to correct a weak eye that made her appear cross-eyed. ‘Unfortunately, the moment the glasses came off, my eyes would go in every direction but toward the person talking to me,’ Roxy said. She became a target for school bullies, she said, so at thirteen had corrective eye surgery—the first of repeated surgeries. Repeated orthodontic work would follow.

  With her parents working long days, Roxy was raised in part by the family housekeeper, Mrs Louisa Moreno, and a series of nannies. From her earliest years, Roxy had something of an explosive temperament, something her designated guardians couldn’t always deal with. ‘She could not always be reasoned with,’ said one family member.

  Her father would recall that at about age six, one nanny became so frustrated with his daughter she put her under a cold shower ‘to stop her carrying on’.

  Roxy clearly idolised her tall, strong, accomplished father. As Nick recalled, ‘We were very close. I was also the disciplinarian though. She knew with me she couldn’t always get away with murder.’

  Though home was the grand harbourfront mansion at 1a Mount Street, Hunters Hill, Nick and Doreen would decide to send their daughter to school at Kambala, an exclusive Anglican school for girls in Rose Bay. The school run would take her the best part of forty-five minutes each way as the school was on the other side of Sydney Harbour and the Sydney CBD. With no school buses to ferry her to Kambala, Nick Jacenko would book his primary-school-aged daughter a Silver Service taxi to transport the young Roxy from their Hunters Hill home to her Rose Bay school while he headed to his business headquarters in Ultimo.

  ‘We had a system. She’d get in the taxi and then ring me to give me the cab driver’s number—so that I could ring the taxi company and trace the car. In a pretty short time she knew every Silver Service taxi driver in the fleet and, I think, they knew her too.’ Family friends were amazed at the amount of autonomy young Roxy had. She would tell the story of Doreen putting her in a taxi and sending her off alone, aged ten, to have braces put on her teeth.

  At home, life changed rather a lot for Roxy with the arrival of a sister, Ruby, in 1989. As a youngster, Roxy adored her little sister and would profess to playing her part in raising Ruby who was ten years her junior. As Ruby grew and came into her teenage years, the siblings’ relationship would change as Ruby came to resent her sister’s sometimes overbearing manner. Roxy viewed herself as the authority on many subjects and would constantly offer her little sister unsolicited advice.

  Roxy would later confide to intimates that she had enjoyed life as an only child to such an extent she planned to have only one child herself—she didn’t want to make any daughter or son of hers endure the frustrations of having a sibling, particularly one like Ruby, who was free-spirited and, in her view, somewhat irresponsible. She may also not have relished sharing two preoccupied parents.

  By 1993, the Jacenko’s business was booming. Nick decided the time had come to build a factory offshore to increase their output and keep up with demand. Nick recalled: ‘During the late nineties it was becoming increasingly difficult to produce garments locally. Union activity and local manufacturing quality issues pushed me to investigate moving garment production overseas.’

  He explored his options for a factory—‘an Indonesian factory on the beach, a dream’, ‘India, no beach and no quality’, ‘Russia, a uniform factory’ or Fiji, where government import duty incentives were tempting.

  ‘By chance I bumped into a guy sitting on the steps [outside what was then his office in Kippax Street, Surry Hills]. As it happened his wife was inside trying out for a sample machinist position. He told me he was from Sri Lanka and worked in the clothing industry there. Neither he nor his wife was employed and they needed work. I needed a despatch
person and said to him, “Start tomorrow”,’ Nick said.

  The man was Sam Sirasena. Sirasena suggested a factory in Sri Lanka, which was then encouraging foreign investment. The two men flew to Sri Lanka to investigate and scout opportunities.

  ‘There already existed a culture for high quality owing to the fact that Marks and Spencer had established manufacturing there. English was also widely spoken. We looked at a number of sites and settled on a 2-acre site near Bentota, which was the holiday area. On our return I decided that if we were going to stay in business this was our best option.’

  In 1998, Nick’s younger brother Dusan, recently separated from his wife, relocated to Sri Lanka from Australia to set up Capitol Lanka. Dusan would oversee construction of a large factory with sewage treatment plants, water and power. The steel structure for the building was made in Australia and shipped in four 40-foot containers to Sri Lanka. Within six months, manufacturing was underway. At its peak, between 300 and 400 people were employed at Capitol Lanka.

  Inclined to take his Christmas holidays in Sri Lanka to check on operations at the factory, Nick was in the country on 26 December 2004 when an earthquake triggered a series of devastating tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. The tsunami hit the entire coastline of Sri Lanka. However, in Bentota, where the Jacenkos’ factory was based, on the country’s south-west coast, the impact was less than in other regions, where waves 9 and 10 metres high had devastated the coast.

  The Capitol boss was in the water when the tsunami hit Bentota and injured his back—his 15-year-old daughter Ruby was also there and escaped injury. Despite the devastation in other parts of the country and in that region of the world, the Jacenko’s factory was high and dry. The Capitol Lanka workforce, said Nick, was grateful to have been spared and eager to resume work—their incomes would help them support extended family left stricken by the natural disaster.

  It would take a devastating divorce from wife Doreen to finally halt production at the factory in 2013.