Roxy recalled to Business Chicks the moment she decided to go into business for herself: ‘I still remember it was a Tuesday afternoon, and I thought, “You know what, let’s do it!” So that night I went to the local Chinese place with my mum and dad, and we were sitting around the lazy-Susan table and I said, “Oh by the way I’m going to start a PR company”.’
‘They thought I was joking!’ she told another media outlet.
She wasn’t.
CHAPTER 5
Sweaty Betty
It was every man for himself
Roxy
HER FATHER’S BUSINESS associate Brian Tinant was good to his word and in 2004, Roxy started her own business with a ready-made list of clients courtesy of the Tinine Group boss. She would insist she had no financial backing from her parents, but 700 square metres of free office space in their Queen Street, Beaconsfield commercial headquarters with office furniture and equipment supplied by Mum and Dad was undeniably a bonus—some might even say a privilege. After registering her business name on 1 April 2004—April Fool’s Day—operations were underway in her parents’ vast showroom by July.
Tinant’s staff sent over enough garment samples from the forthcoming season ranges of the many labels he distributed to enable Roxy to set up a vast showroom that she would excitedly call her ‘one-stop shop’ for media, stylists and celebrities. She planned to make the office ‘the go-to destination for media in search of the perfect pieces for their pages, websites and photo shoots [and] VIPs … to browse all of our collections’.
It wasn’t exactly a Diesel store, but it was an ‘energetic hub of activity’, as she later trumpeted on the Sweaty Betty website. She had the space decorated in an industrial style to resemble a shop, with chunky hanging rails, racks for shoes and bags, and benches and counter displays for accessories and beauty products. She hoped the office was fabulous enough to entice the country’s top fashion editors to hop into a taxi and take the 10-minute trip to Beaconsfield, then an unfashionable semi-industrial area south of the Sydney CBD.
‘We’re only as far away as Paddington,’ Roxy would say optimistically, hoping her clients would overlook the ideological chasm that separated Beaconsfield from the infinitely more fashionable Paddington in Sydney’s east, if travel time was a drawback.
Her PR style, she and Tinant had agreed, would be ‘cutting edge’. She would work out what that meant as she went along. ‘I saw a need to do fashion PR differently. I had no training but I had to find a way of getting into people’s faces,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald.
She would tell Business Chicks:
I realised that I had a different tactic for creating PR opportunities because I hadn’t formally been trained. I wasn’t trained in the school of ‘send a press release and hope for the best’. I was more a salesgirl type of PR person because it was every man for himself. It was: do your best, you’ve got no teacher and let’s hope it works. It was a great benefit because you fuck up and make errors, then you have to fix them without knowing the best way to do it.
With only four months’ PR experience, Roxy threw herself headlong into her new business. The job, as she saw it, was to email media and clients—‘I try to get 200 emails down by 11 a.m. and I’m ready to hit another 200 by the end of the day’—meet media and clients, create press kits for clients, research ‘the latest international trends across all industries—beauty, hospitality, design and fashion’, and prepare business pitches and reports.
She had picked up some business operations skills spending her school holidays doing work experience at her parents’ company but she would acknowledge she knew next to nothing about accounting, tax and managing staff.
‘There are lots of challenges when you’re young,’ she would tell Business Chicks. ‘You do realise the importance of the backend of your business. By that I mean accounting, checking your debtors list, making sure clients are paying within the terms. It’s learning day-to-day running of a business.’
To begin with, Roxy would share some of Capitol’s business resources—the Capitol accountant became hers also and would work for Sweaty Betty for some years, working one frantic day a week managing Roxy’s invoices.
Despite her claims to have honed her craft at Diesel, Roxy admitted she actually knew very little about the world of PR when she started out on her own: ‘I didn’t really know what I’d gotten myself into,’ she would tell one fashion blogsite. ‘I probably didn’t think enough about the practicalities of running a business such as accounts, employing staff, etc. I wasn’t apprehensive about it but it’s something anyone starting a business needs to think about.’ Luckily for Roxy, her boyfriend at the time knew quite a bit more.
Adam Abrams was working for one of Sydney’s best-known publicists in 2004, the British-born spruiker Max Markson from Markson Sparks! Markson could sell rattlesnake heads in jelly—in fact he once sold them as a novelty collectable. He had also, since 1982, run a successful publicity, promotions, event and celebrity management company. He knew, better than most, if a story was worth selling; and he knew how to milk it for an angle if it wasn’t. If it happened to be a sex scandal, he had no qualms with that either. With a boyfriend ensconced in Markson’s day-to-day operations, Roxy was able to extract just enough from Abrams to begin grasping the business of PR. A mutual friend at the time said the phone line rang hot from Roxy’s Beaconsfield office to the Markson Sparks! office in Surry Hills.
Markson’s methods were tried and true and were based on the principles employed by salespeople the world over: act confidently, dress expensively, drive a flash car and give them that old razzle-dazzle. Then, once you’ve signed a new client, work your magic—write the press release, distribute it to the media, make some follow-up calls, organise some interviews, get them on television if you can, send a bill, bank the money.
No client was too small for Markson—Advanced Hair, Lemon Detox Diet, Tim the ‘Demtel Man’ and Nad’s Hair Removal. He had worked with all the great late-night television spruikers while simultaneously managing to coax former prime minister Bob Hawke and his longtime mistress Blanche d’Alpuget into matching bathrobes for television. With Markson, attitude was king: ‘Persistence. Enthusiasm. Focus … the three guide rules I apply to everything,’ he once said.
Roxy would tear a couple of pages from the Max Markson manifesto. She would also, from time to time in the years that followed, quote the shameless but lovable tub-thumper in interviews. ‘Max Markson actually once said to me “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper”,’ she said, crediting Markson with the timeworn British adage.
Markson would repay the favour in 2012 when Marion Farrelly, the British television producer working on Channel Nine’s The Celebrity Apprentice on which Markson had appeared in 2011, phoned him to ask what until then had been an inconceivable concept: ‘Who’s the female equivalent of you?’ Knowing Roxy and thinking highly of her, he answered without hesitation—‘Roxy Jacenko’—and Farrelly, valuing Markson’s opinion, cast Roxy in the 2013 season of the show.
With enough stock to entice media to her showroom and an accountant sorted, Roxy would next need staff—the women she would come to dub her ‘Bettys’. The Bettys were, almost without exception, young women who thought Roxy epitomised the PR dream. (There had been a Tim once, but he was rumoured to have fallen out with Roxy after popping out for an unsanctioned spray tan.)
Many of the young women who came to Sweaty Betty for a job had conjured an image of the consummate PR executive from television. The idealised PR executive was one part Dahlia from Lipstick Jungle, one part Samantha from Sex and the City and two parts Heather Locklear’s ruthless Amanda Woodward from Melrose Place.
Roxy liked interns: they were cheap and eager. A university degree was not a requirement—a willingness to work up to twelve hours a day was. ‘She likes to train them up in the Sweaty Betty way,’ said a former Betty. She would try employing older women through the years but found they, by and large, were too set
in their ways and Roxy wasn’t always flexible or patient. She didn’t care to employ women with more experience than herself, said a former staffer, because ‘they might challenge her processes and choose to work more strategically than she did’.
Sweaty Betty’s staff numbers would increase with the addition of a personal assistant, and later an account manager, showroom coordinator and junior publicist.
If getting Sydney’s premier fashion editors and stylists to her Beaconsfield showroom to sample her clients’ clothing, accessories and beauty products was her initial plan, her end goal was to get their products into magazines and newspapers and onto celebrity bodies, and make a lot of money doing it.
A former employee explained:
Her aim wasn’t to have high end only. It was to have diversity in her showroom. She wanted a fashion editor or stylist to be able to walk in and put a DVF dress with a pair of Wanted Shoes, a Strandbag bag, a pair of Kenneth Cole sunglasses, a Shiseido lipstick and a Porsche watch. That was what she did really well—recognised the opportunity was there to do that. Others were already doing it, though she’d not really seen it firsthand.
Using her big personality and bigger voice to soothe any beginner’s nerves, Roxy’s brash style became her calling card and it quickly made an impact on Sydney’s media. Her time on the phones at Marcs had not been for nothing. She struck up relationships quickly and thought nothing of mining her new circle of contacts for information. She wanted to know what her rivals were doing well, what they were doing poorly and how she could beat them at their own game.
The Marcs and Diesel publicity experience had also given her an insight as to how time poor some media were. What they most valued from a publicist was haste—someone to fix a problem for them quickly. Roxy found she could exploit this. She would make it a priority for Sweaty Betty to be as accommodating, efficient and fast as possible.
No-one was in a bigger hurry to succeed than Roxy.
‘Within our first week we had signed Von Dutch, Christian Lacroix, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana … and people got vicious,’ she said, spinning her client list to The Daily Telegraph. Her PR rivals would eventually get vicious, but these were early days. Traditional PR methods Roxy found taxing. She would dispense with lengthy press releases in the early days because she ‘couldn’t write for shit!’
‘I was saying the press release is dead. I created “News Snippets” because I couldn’t write a press release,’ Roxy would declare, laying claim to this remarkable thing—the ‘news snippet’—during an interview with one blogger. The ‘news snippet’ was in fact a mini press release. The demand from media was primarily for images and captions, so that’s what they got from Sweaty Betty—with a brief blurb Roxy rebelliously loved to call a ‘news snippet’.
She wasn’t one for acknowledging weakness but knew her strengths better than most. She knew, for instance, that she could out-hustle just about anyone. ‘I was just hungry and a hustler,’ she would say of her time working for Diesel, in an interview with Fairfax Media. ‘I knew I had a niche and a new way of doing things that was disruptive and it was getting press and [my clients] were getting sales.’ The hustle, as her staff saw it, was a God-given gift their boss had to get people to agree to pretty much anything.
According to a former Betty:
What she lacked in actual PR skills and industry knowledge she made up for in confidence, incredible quick thinking and having her finger on the pulse of everything contemporary and on pop culture. Roxy is really clued up in lots of surprising areas—she knows a lot about things like modern art and urban culture. I think you could put her in a room with anyone and she’d have them laughing and intrigued from the outset. People always seem a bit dazed after meeting Roxy for the first time.
She utilised every resource at her disposal, including her new media allies, to help her win more clients.
Observers recalled Roxy going after the lingerie brand Bras N Things with typical vigour. The company held an event to launch its Ultimate Cleavage Collection at Tank Nightclub in Sydney’s CBD in August 2004, just weeks after Roxy had opened Sweaty Betty’s accounts. Through an associate at Nine to Five magazine, Roxy managed to score an invitation as the journalist’s guest. Once inside the nightclub, Roxy started handing out her new business cards in full view of the PR consultant and business rival who had organised the event, Tory Archbold of Torstar, the Bras N Things PR manager.
Archbold, in her late twenties, had been making waves herself at the time as the bright new thing on Sydney’s PR scene. Her business, Torstar, was doing a nice trade with young fashion clients and Archbold was pregnant. As her due date loomed, she arranged meetings with clients and was surprised to find upon arrival at her clients’ offices Roxy’s leopard-skin-printed Sweaty Betty folders lying in plain view.
‘Roxy had definitely lined her up to steal her business,’ said a Torstar offsider. ‘Tory always suspected Roxy had taken a look at her website and just printed the list of clients out and gone after everyone on it.’
Archbold said:
Looking back I have to admire her tenacity. She wanted what I had and went for it. Her approach was rather ballsy, however, it didn’t impact my business. I went on to attract global brands to my portfolio and she nailed campaigns for local brands who were seeking quick solutions rather than long-term strategic partnerships. She has definitely delivered in this category.
The name of Roxy’s business had been mired in controversy. After launching her business in 2004, she received a legal letter from British fashion retailer Sweaty Betty, whose name she had appropriated.
Roxy had attempted to be transparent and complimentary when explaining the inspiration for her business name was a UK activewear company founded in 1998 by British entrepreneurs Tamara and Simon Hill-Norton.
She told Fashion Journal in 2016:
When I was in my early 20s, I travelled to London. Sweaty Betty is the name of an activewear company over in the UK and I instantly loved the name. When I decided to create my own PR agency, I thought Sweaty Betty was perfect. Not only was it memorable but it’s a cheeky take on the approach we take for our clients. We never stop looking for and creating opportunities for our clients, day in day out. Don’t walk, run!
The activewear company, with its of-the-moment slogan ‘inspiring women to find empowerment through fitness’, was named Harpers & Queen (Britain’s equivalent of Harper’s Bazaar) Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003, so when Roxy ripped off its name less than a year later, the fashion design team weren’t going to ignore it. Sweaty Betty activewear hired lawyers and threatened a lawsuit if Roxy didn’t immediately cease using the business name.
After threats of litigation and a planned day in court, the company was finally satisfied Roxy had no business expansion plans in mind for the United Kingdom. She had argued successfully that her business name—Sweaty Betty PR—included ‘PR’ in its name and that the two businesses were not in conflict within the fashion business.
It was probably a good thing that an attempt to open a London office in 2012, which would see her identify British clients wishing to penetrate the Australian market, fell over after a few months, though Roxy would spin it as having been an unmitigated success.
Roxy never understated her grand plans for Sweaty Betty. In a business profile, she declared she was ‘out to turn the traditional public relations model on its head and create a unique agency that was honest, efficient, well-connected, and results-driven, with an enviable brand identity that would become the beacon of quality in the communications industry’.
She was also not averse to employing disruptive tactics when she thought it might benefit a client—though sometimes the only people she managed to disrupt were her own staff. ‘When Roxy came to work of a day you’d hear her before you saw her. She’d be shouting instructions before she appeared,’ said one ex-Betty.
She absolutely never stopped. She’d be scouring the internet on her phone during the night and see somet
hing and become fixated on the idea of trying to replicate it for one of our clients—a photo shoot, a gimmick. She was manic. She’d want to clear the decks—everybody’s decks—all her staff had to wipe their diaries too to give Roxy’s idea their full attention. This meant other clients might sometimes get neglected.
Some clients weren’t always happy with this approach, particularly the ones hoping to roll out global strategies based on long-term planning and expanded marketing synergies that would see planned advertising campaigns and internal publicity strategies dovetail with the PR strategy. These clients didn’t love Roxy’s off-the-cuff, spontaneous approach to PR, though they were often broadsided by her enthusiasm.
While she was gaining some traction with the media and steadily building her client base, outside Sweaty Betty’s offices in the broader industry at large she was getting a name as the new brat in town—the Virgin Airlines of Aussie PR.
The Australian PR landscape in the early noughties was a serious business in which industry professionals talked rather a lot about KPIs (key performance indicators), KRAs (key results areas) and AVEs (advertising value equivalents). The public relations industry had grown out of the excesses of the 1980s advertising industry and in fierce opposition to it. Whereas old school ad industry executives had a reputation for boozing, snorting and skirt-chasing, PR industry executives, in their quest to be taken seriously and win a greater slice of a client’s ad budget, had created a world of measurable goals, achievable targets, conference calls and PowerPoint presentations.
The women in PR were famously principled, close-lipped and demure. They saw their job as being first and foremost to faithfully promote a brand without deviating from the corporate brief. Being ‘on brand’ was next to godliness. Their key messages had to fall into line with a strict marketing strategy emanating from Europe, America or Asia. Or from Geelong, Erskine Park, Whyalla or Darling Downs.
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