Blonde Ambition

by Annette Sharp

  With Roxy, business was always personal and she would soon become an enthusiastic employer of a cast of willing lawyers who would happily take her money and fight any battle on her behalf.

  By and large, the more genteel quality of a good salesperson—empathy—Roxy lacked. She was also inclined to arrogance, but one might expect that of a young rag trade heiress starting out in the multi-million-dollar fashion business her parents had built from the ground up.

  Some might imagine the arrogance didn’t matter, except it did.

  It was evident in the sacking by her mother, six months into her job at Capitol: ‘She wouldn’t do what she was asked to do without argument,’ her father would say.

  ‘I had decided at eighteen that I knew how to run [my mother’s] business better than she did,’ Roxy admitted in interviews. ‘I was one of those people who used to try and tell mum and dad how to run their business. Even though I had no idea at the time, I thought I knew a lot at eighteen!’

  Roxy put it behind her and moved on.

  At the drive-thru window of the McDonald’s restaurant in Drummoyne, Roxy had learned to believe one of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc’s sales mantras: ‘We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in show business.’ The restaurant chain was also image conscious—something that mattered increasingly to an impressionable teenage Roxy. The McDonald’s ‘counter girl smile’ mattered almost as much as speed and efficiency at a drive-through window: ‘McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image,’ Kroc had advised.

  Roxy would wax lyrical about her two years at McDonald’s two decades later: ‘The policies and procedures that McDonalds has in place put me in a good position as to how to run a business in a methodical way,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2016. Henceforth, Roxy’s drive-through smile would be part of her arsenal.

  While being trained in American multinational corporate sales strategy, Roxy continued toying with the idea of a career in fashion like her parents. She would say she had, as a child, held dreams of one day becoming a fashion buyer for a major department store like Grace Bros.

  During her days running a fashion outlet at Centrepoint, Doreen had befriended Linda Bowen, the designer and founder, with Raymond Levis, of the Dotti fashion chain. Dotti’s Paddington store was a popular retail destination for the young women of Sydney. Spotting a gap in Dotti’s merchandise range, Roxy would make diamante belts and bracelets and sell them outside the shop. Aged about seventeen, Roxy would buy the stringing wire and diamantes in bulk and spend her evenings threading them onto strands and then soldering the findings on the ends. She would then pack the lot into her red-orange Volvo and drive to Paddington.

  On Saturdays, the Oxford Street branch of St George Bank, one shopfront west of Dotti, was closed for business and its art deco entrance foyer made the perfect place for Roxy to set up a street stand and sell her wares. On a good Saturday, she could make between $800 and $1000 in cash. Demand was high, as too was interest, but Roxy soon began encountering the hazards of hawking.

  She found she had some stiff competition for the space. An incense seller, who often set up his own stand first, started harassing her. On occasion he would hurl her goods onto the footpath. Roxy, accustomed to being bullied at school, would find her voice and stand up for herself. Occasionally she would also encounter some of her uppity school classmates, who would throw the young street trader withering stares.

  Unfortunately, the manager of Dotti wasn’t happy with the aggravation at her front door. Doreen would attempt to placate her friend, but Linda, mindful of the area’s retail prestige, was said to have remained unhappy about having a hawker on her doorstep.

  Concerned about his daughter, Nick Jacenko found he was soon spending his Saturdays working as Roxy’s bodyguard. After standing watch over her for a month of Saturdays, he would hire a security guard to protect his daughter for him. With all the excitement outside 354 Oxford Street, the local council would soon have to deal with the Dotti owner’s appeals and intervene, telling the young spruiker to move on. Being Roxy, and further toughened by the experience, she wouldn’t go easily.

  With her belt business occupying only half of her weekend, Roxy found she still had Sundays free. This she would soon remedy with a series of other jobs. One of these was at a Double Bay florist then known as Lydia Florist, in New South Head Road, Double Bay.

  Yet another job would fuel an immense fascination, bordering on obsession, with the private lives of Double Bay’s rich and famous set. At Foto First in Cross Street, Double Bay, Roxy found she had access to the newly developed photographic prints of some of the richest people in the country. She would head home from work wide-eyed with amazement and recount to her family much of what she had seen, in 4-by-6-inch living Kodacolor. The holidays, the husbands, the wives, the mistresses, the babies, the family reunions, the special occasions—she had a peephole on Sydney’s upper-class Double Bay and it both excited and inspired her.

  The florist job similarly inspired her. Not only did she love the penalty rates at Lydia Florist, she also found she had a natural aptitude for floral design. In future years, when life and her businesses overwhelmed her, she would say she could see herself running a flower shop in her later years. She was still working weekends at the florist years later when she started her own PR business. She would find it hard to give the job away.

  By age eighteen, Roxy’s bank account was in good shape. She was on track to achieving a pressing goal—to save the 10 per cent deposit for her own apartment, something her mother had ‘nagged her’ to do after pointing out that ‘clothes and shoes don’t appreciate’. At age twenty, Roxy would realise her goal and, with about $30 000 she had managed to save, buy an old-style apartment in Guilfoyle Avenue, Double Bay. It was 2000. Nine years later, she would sell it for $750 000—twice the $336 000 price she’d bought it for. Roxy would tell The New Daily a decade later:

  I saved really hard and used all my savings to buy an apartment when I was 21 [sic]. I was a good saver, I didn’t go out and blow away all my money on Saturday nights or anything like that. You’ve got to think long term, not short term. Because I’d been working since I was 14, it gave me ample time to be able to earn a 10 per cent deposit for a nice place. So that’s what I did.

  Delighted their daughter was showing her business chops and paying off a mortgage, Nick and Doreen Jacenko would soon spoil their daughter with a new set of wheels—the VW Golf convertible. It wasn’t the sports car she lusted after but was a welcome improvement on the Volvo.

  Roxy’s next job would see her win a role with a pair of Sydney entrepreneurs who had joined forces in the fashion industry. Theo Onisforou had proved himself while working as chief investment manager for Kerry Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings in the late eighties and nineties when Packer, then Australia’s richest man, was at the height of his power. For a decade it was Onisforou’s relationship with Packer that mattered most when Onisforou’s name was mentioned in Sydney’s business and finance circles, an old boy’s admiration society built on the deepest pockets and the ardent belief that if you brushed up against a Packer, gold dust would rub off.

  History would show that for Onisforou it had, but it was his friendship with another future powerbroker that brought him to Kerry Packer’s attention. While studying law at the University of New South Wales, Onisforou encountered future prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a Sydney University law student. As Paul Barry recorded in his biography Who Wants to Be a Billionaire: The James Packer Story, Onisforou may have proved useful to Turnbull in notating university lectures. Onisforou would say the introductions were made via Turnbull’s wife, Lucy, whom he had known first. The two men later jointly invested in a Randwick restaurant, Onisforou once revealed to a newspaper.

  The Greek-Australian Onisforou would make himself indispensable to the Packers for a time. He would score a job with the old man in the late 1980s and, thr
ough him, befriend his son James, with whom he became partners in a property development venture that made both men richer.

  After meeting dynamic fashion retailer Mark Keighery of the Marcs label in the early 1990s, Onisforou took an unexpected detour into fashion in a fifty-fifty partnership with the Sydney fashion innovator. The two men seemed an unlikely match but found they were kindred spirits. Both were boxing enthusiasts—Onisforou, at one time, was manager of the Australian champion boxer Jeff Fenech. Their association would last until Keighery’s premature death at age fifty-three from cancer in 2008.

  The famously disciplined Keighery was a fashion trailblazer in Australia. He also ran a meticulous ship and was both feared and revered at his fashion headquarters. Having anticipated the trend away from drab men’s clothing and towards a demand for pastel colours in the Aussie bloke’s wardrobe, Keighery would become one of the nation’s first metrosexual icons after introducing pink, lilac and Liberty print business shirts to Australian men’s wardrobes in 1984. The style-obsessed Keighery also foresaw a demand for high-profile international brands and was the first to import labels Helmut Lang, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Pucci, Dries Van Noten, Etro, Malandrino and Juicy Couture to Australia. But before these labels became part of the Marcs story, there was the Italian jeans brand Diesel.

  ‘When I met Mark he was typical fashion: great style, great taste, no business acumen and no money, so we were a perfect fit,’ Onisforou told fashion website Exposed Online in 2015.

  A chance meeting in a New York taxi with ‘jeans genius’ Renzo Russo, the founder of Diesel, would start a lifelong friendship between Keighery and his Italian fashion contemporary, who handed Keighery a suitcase full of denim separates and the exclusive international rights to sell his brand in Australia. Onisforou helped propel the dream as a private investor.

  A decade later, Roxy, who credits Keighery and Onisforou with giving her her big break, scored a job as a receptionist at Marcs. Onisforou liked to tell the story that it was he who gave Roxy the job that would one day launch her PR career. ‘She was so aggressive and so ambitious, I knew we were simply a bus stop on the way through,’ Onisforou would tell The Sydney Morning Herald.

  Both Onisforou and Keighery liked Roxy’s spark and energy, but she would soon encounter problems dealing with Marc’s managers. During her four years as a receptionist, Roxy’s natural interest in business operations saw Keighery let her, from time to time, leave the reception desk and dip a toe into other parts of the business. She liked to say the receptionist role allowed her to move ‘throughout the business’ where she ‘learnt every spectrum’ of it.

  ‘I actually started as a receptionist and office admin,’ she told Beauticate website. ‘I had no idea really what I wanted to do, other than get a job and not go to school!’

  Showing a natural aptitude for publicity, she was given an opportunity to move into the PR team and work with premium brand Diesel. Diesel was the Italian jeans brand that was launched by Russo in Italy in the 1970s as a nod to classic American 1950s culture and by the 1990s, thanks to a marketing blitz in the northern hemisphere, was the coolest jeans brand on the planet.

  ‘In my final four months with the company, my then boss moved me into a PR and marketing role, which is how I found my niche!’ she told Business Chicks website in 2013.

  The Diesel PR brief came largely from Europe and Keighery, who loved the brand, injected a touch of himself into the marketing locally. Choosing boutiques at prime locations, he created a cool party vibe around the brand by holding exclusive party launches for his A-list celebrity and elite business friends. A Diesel shop, in line with its US counterparts, was a must-stop, one-stop fashion destination, and also, on Keighery’s watch, was party central. Coupled with a generous marketing budget and a funky, arty, tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign that became a talking point, Diesel was soon everywhere and was loud, brash and rebellious.

  The local PR campaign would involve the bombardment of media with news of Diesel’s arrival. There was an element of contagion about the brand—and Roxy caught it. After four months working with the brand internally, she pitched for the business—the PR newcomer wanted to set up her own agency and take Diesel with her as her first client.

  The idea didn’t go down well at Marcs. Her manager felt undermined and relations quickly broke down. Her first experience of personal PR may have also contributed to her departure from Marcs and Diesel. In February 2004, Roxy gave an interview in which she was hailed by a young newspaper reporter as Diesel’s ‘marketing director’ and an ‘accessory buyer’: ‘I started at the bottom and this is definitely my ultimate job,’ she said. The interview may have been premature.

  She retained her ‘ultimate job’ for just four months.

  In a frank interview, Roxy would later say the experience taught her a valuable lesson: ‘Not to tell managers how to do their job.’ She admitted with typical candour her supervisors had taken to telling her to ‘shut up’.

  Despite the flat ‘no’ to the idea of managing Diesel’s PR independently, Roxy pushed on with her agency plans. She left Keighery’s company as the Diesel PR account was offered to the more established and offbeat creative one-stop events shop, Mr and Mrs Fish, run by Victoria and Robert Fisher.

  Roxy would credit the ‘creative’ Keighery and the ‘business baron’ Onisforou with unlocking the passionate publicist within. In the autonomous and wily Onisforou, Roxy would find a multi-millionaire worth appraisal. The son of Greek fruit and veg shop vendors, Onisforou had his fingers everywhere and, like her parents, had invested well in Sydney property.

  Onisforou worked his Sydney network like few others. Through his attachment to the Packers and Turnbull, the investor had built a network of influential media contacts. He knew how to secure positive stories that benefited his own interests. He was even rumoured to have one journalist on his private payroll. From Onisforou, Roxy could glean how she might begin to crack Sydney’s media—with enough indebted journalists on side to do her bidding.

  Years after leaving Marcs and setting up her own business in 2014, Roxy would be contracted by Onisforou to publicise his Paddington retail strip, The Intersection. It would only be a shortlived reunion. Onisforou is said to have found his former protégé much changed by her social media Insta-fame. ‘She was on a notoriety trip after The Celebrity Apprentice,’ an Intersection associate said of Roxy.

  The contract for the business may have been short term but Roxy was smart enough to continue promoting Onisforou’s businesses on her social media accounts after it had ended and the investor would continue to call her a friend: ‘Most people would not know there is a nice Roxy in there,’ he told Fairfax Media.

  Roxy maintained she left Diesel after being approached by British businessman Brian Tinant, CEO of wholesale and retail fashion distributor Tinine Group, to manage his fashion brands. Tinant owned the licensing rights to a number of international luxury brands including, at various times, Basler, Kenzo, Jaeger, Pablo, Diane von Furstenberg, Betty Barclay, Olsen and Von Dutch. He also owned multibrand stores in Sydney and Perth, the unibrand flagship boutique Maria Finlay in Double Bay, another in Melbourne’s Toorak Road, and five outlet stores around the country. Tinant was also an associate of Nick Jacenko, and Nick would say it was he who introduced his daughter to the businessman to keep her PR dream alive. According to Roxy, Tinant was impressed with the ‘great press’ she was getting for Diesel and offered her a job doing PR ‘with an edge’. When she declined his offer, Tinant suggested she set up her own business.

  ‘[Brian] said “If you don’t want to come and work for me, why don’t you set up your own business and I’ll set you up with all of my brands?”’ she recalled.

  A random bag snatching may have motivated her further. Roxy liked to tell the story that she was the victim of a bag snatch in Redfern when a thief leaned into her car and stole her prized Louis Vuitton handbag, laptop and make-up. The insurance cheque was enough, she would say, to regi
ster the business name Sweaty Betty PR and begin a new career that would enable her to buy her dream car, the much-wanted Mercedes SLR.

  Roxy said she bought the convertible Mercedes partly as a reward, partly as an incentive. ‘People look and go, “Wow, she’s done really well in a year. We want to align ourselves with success”,’ she would tell Fairfax Media in 2013. It was an insight into Roxy’s awareness of what prestige brand association could do for her image.

  Her father would recall the story only slightly differently. He vividly remembered Roxy telling him she was sitting in the new Mercedes when she noticed a young man observing her: ‘She thought he was checking her out—that she looked like a good sort. The next thing she knew he had leant in and grabbed her handbag and run off with it.’

  Nick couldn’t recall Roxy using an insurance cheque to register her business. He believed Sweaty Betty was already operational by then but recalled a large insurance payment being banked by Roxy following a head-on accident with a drunk driver in Paddington.

  To Roxy, the PR business was ‘fast, celebrity-packed and sparkly’ —‘like a movie’. She had always loved ‘sparkly’ and it may have been the promise of glitter and stardust that drew her to Paddington once more to work as a ‘door bitch’ for an Oxford Street nightclub. Goodbar was then one of Sydney’s newer nightclubs and the part-time work would provide Roxy with an outlet for her natural curiosity about glamorous people. It also sharpened her skills for her burgeoning PR career—something taking off in tandem. There would be plenty of opportunities to stand at a venue door and tick names off guestlists in the future with Sweaty Betty.