Opening a Strand Arcade flagship has extra meaning for Vallance as she has always wanted to occupy this exact space. In a prime corner spot, at the George Street end of the 19th-century arcade, the store is a swathe of plush carpeting, its expansive racks of suits and gowns ripe for playing dress-up. The brand now has so many categories, ranging from bridal to swimwear to children’s, that a store of a certain size is needed to showcase it all properly. “This is the level of store we are going to start rolling out.”
Indeed, Vallance intends to open a further 20 stores in just a few years: four more are imminent here, and at least five overseas. A boutique in London, first, where Vallance lived when she founded the brand, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. And the Middle East is becoming more important with each season, says Vallance.
Looks from the Rebecca Vallance winter collection.
Part of her enduring appeal is the way her clothes fit so many body shapes, something Vallance feels comes innately with the territory of being a woman designing for other women. “I’ve been so many shapes and sizes, so I understand the girl with big boobs, the girl with no chest, the girl who is pregnant, when it’s hard to lose the baby weight. I’ve been through it all, and I have very strong opinions on how the collection needs to look.” The team wants to take their client “through the requirements of her day – when you’re doing drop-off to when you’re going to a beautiful event.”
In this way the brand might be seen as the heir to Carla Zampatti, which dressed business leaders and politicians for decades (interestingly, that brand’s latest collection is sexier and cooler – more like Rebecca Vallance).
Vallance designed pyjamas and an amenities kit for Qantas business class travellers to New York.
But perhaps most crucially, and unlike a brand like Carla Zampatti, the collections need to hit the right notes for a global audience. Vallance might personally dislike orange, but her American customers can’t get enough of it. And with more than half of direct online sales coming from the US, it’s a preference she needs to indulge.
“I launched the business in London and at that point I never thought we’d ever come back to live in Australia,” says Vallance of her international success. “I wanted the brand to have an international DNA. It needed to be relevant overseas.”
Today, those Rebecca Vallance bows are everywhere from Harvey Nichols to Selfridges to Galeries Lafayette. Those feather-trimmed pants are on the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. They are online, at Net-A-Porter and Mytheresa (whose chief commercial and sustainability officer Richard Johnson calls RV “a significant player” in its eveningwear category).
Vallance handles each wholesale client personally. It means she squeezes out more hours of the day than most. “If I wait to start working until 9am in Sydney, the US is at home and Europe is asleep. So I work one and a half days every day. I work the second half of the European and American day, and then the full Australian day.”
When she visits New York, or London, for appointments where she shows wholesale buyers her new collections, she usually works two full days – the working day of the city she’s in, and the full Australian day (which falls at night).
“It’s brutal and I wouldn’t want anyone in my team to do it, but I need to know that I’ve done the work.” Vallance pauses before adding: “The thing I really hate is when someone presents a great strategy but they don’t back it up with the work.”
Sylvia Jeffreys has been friends with Vallance since 2012. They met at a function; news presenter Jeffreys was wearing one of Vallance’s gowns and the dress worked like an icebreaker, they hit it off immediately. When Jeffreys married fellow broadcaster Peter Stefanovic in 2017, there was only one person she wanted to make her wedding dress.
“Bec called me to come to her house for a fitting, like, two days after she had had her baby,” says Jeffreys. “And we’re there, with her newborn Raffy, while she’s putting pins in the dress.” Six weeks later, baby in tow, Vallance showed up early on the morning of Jeffreys’ wedding to ensure “that every button was in place”. She also designed the bridesmaids’ dresses.
It was a hectic period: Vallance had set up a breastfeeding section of her office, taking Raffy to work with her every day for seven months, often feeding him during board meetings. “It takes a hundred years to make a brand, and it can all come undone in one moment,” she says of her perfectionist tendencies.
That Vallance does the hard graft could come as a surprise to some, who might see the 44-year-old as the lucky recipient of life’s lottery ticket. Her husband, financier David Gasan, is part of the Gasan Group, one of Malta’s leading business conglomerates. Gasan and Vallance financed the initial stages of the RV business; in 2016, Hotsprings (which also backs P.E Nation) came on board as a strategic investor to assist with operations, it now owns 50 per cent. Gasan and Vallance own the rest.
She also looks like a bombshell. As a teenager she modelled; “It taught me humility. It taught me it’s not all about you. You are not going to be for everyone. Some days it will be your day, some days it won’t.”
Jeffreys is at pains to put paid to any assumptions that Vallance’s path has been easy. “Bec is New York polish with a Ballarat work ethic,” she says. “It’s easy to think that she is a lady who lunches because of the way she looks – but nobody expects more of herself than she does.” (Indeed, Vallance has twice been approached to appear as a regular on The Real Housewives of Sydney. Her publicist did not need to ask her to know it was not something she intended to do.)
Vallance describes herself as a “data nerd” who squirrels herself away on Monday mornings to read international sales reports. She’d rather spend all her time with the design team, but understands that she is needed elsewhere.
“I had high expectations of what I wanted this business to be, and I didn’t want to do it unless it was at that level,” she says. “It means you can never take your finger off the pulse.” Perhaps, I venture, she might hire a CEO? “Yes,” she says. “That’s imminent.”
The winter issue of Fin Magazine – plus the Fin Dining & Wine special – is out on Saturday, May 11 inside AFR Weekend.