Juliette Binoche wears Blue Illusion geometric jacquard seamed jacket $179.95, layered appliqué mesh top $159.95, Le Raquel shaping jean $199.95.
Lunch in Paris with Juliette Binoche: the commitment was in Donna Guest’s diary a few weeks ago. For a Francophile with an international retail empire styled around a French aesthetic, a work day doesn’t get much better than that.
Before the lunch, Guest spent the morning in an apartment in the Marais quarter overseeing a photo shoot with the French actress and style icon, who has signed on as the face of Blue Illusion, Guest’s women’s clothing empire. The images will be used in the retail chain’s catalogues, its windows and online.
“We were looking for a face and she was my No. 1 choice,” Guest says of Binoche, who starred with Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient and with Johnny Depp in Chocolat.
“I didn’t think it was going to be possible given the level where she is – an Academy Award-winner and heavily producing movies back to back. But eight months [after we asked], it happened.”
Binoche will work with Blue Illusion for a year or maybe longer. “She’s been the face of Lancôme, so to take on being the face of Blue Illusion and really elevate our brand is very exciting,” Guest says. “She represents everything we love. She’s French and we’re Francophiles. She is the right age – she’s my age [50] – so we’re speaking to our customers directly.
“We spoke about our children mainly – she has two and I have four. Talking about what they’re up to. She gave me feedback on styling and what things she loved, and it was great she loved what she was wearing.”
For Guest it was a great moment, and a reinforcement of the strong business she and her husband Danny have built. Since opening the first Blue Illusion store in bayside Hampton in 1998 they have opened 125 more – 116 in Australia, 10 in New Zealand and two in San Francisco. They employ about 700 people and last year’s turnover was about $80 million.
It has been a long and intriguing journey. Guest was the eldest of six children. Her parents were Christians (“I didn’t take that on”). They divorced when Guest was eight and her mother remarried two years later.
When Guest was four, her mother took in the first of three foster children, an indigenous boy called Jimmy. The children would stay with the family sometimes six months, sometimes a year.
They lived in Seaford. Guest remembers one day standing with her brother, mother and Jimmy at a bus stop on a shopping trip to Frankston. “We were dressed in matching outfits to go shopping,” she says. “A lady said to my mum, ‘You’ve got one in every colour’. My mum just laughed.”
Young Donna enjoyed having Jimmy in the house. “We really got along. If anything I was a little jealous of him because he was a little [six months] older than me and he probably got more attention. He was adopted by another family.”
Guest was an independently minded teenager and left home at 16, moving into a bedsit in Balaclava.
“I chose a different path from my family,” she says. “They were quite religious and had a very simple life. And I chose to be working and felt I should be independent. I don’t think it was unusual back in the ’80s to move out of home [young].”
She found a job as a secretary in a law firm in Ripponlea and bought a VW Golf for $800. Her boss suggested she live above the office, which she did for a few years.
“I didn’t have any fear of living alone. In those days I didn’t have a mobile phone or a [home] phone.
“I didn’t put my money into that; it was more about fashion and what I looked like. It was all about shoes and the outfits I could afford.
“It wasn’t this terrible disaster where I had to leave home. My mum had remarried and she was starting a young family. I felt grown up and felt I should be living my own life.”
Was there any resistance from her parents about leaving home? “Not really,” she says. “I was fine. If you look at people who are self-made, most stories are fairly similar: they haven’t had a formal education, they’re self-taught, they tend to be more street-wise. That independence is a real skill to have and I thank my parents for allowing that to happen because I probably wouldn’t be here [otherwise].”
Danny Guest and later they moved in together. Danny started the Blue Illusion business in 1986. They married two years later and in 1991, pregnant with their second child, Guest started in the business. “It was probably because I loved clothing,” she says. “I’m self-trained, as is my husband, and we’ve taken it to new heights. I was a legal secretary so there were some skills that were handy when we were dealing with leases and debt.”
They soon moved from a wholesale business to retail.
“I started off in the office managing accounts then got into sales and then into product,” she says. “By the time we started opening stores my focus was on product.”
At 30 Guest took her first trip to France, igniting a life-long love affair with all things French, an aesthetic that permeates the Blue Illusion brand.
The couple were effective collaborators. “He understood I have a natural ability with the creative side but I needed to understand the numbers,” she says.
However they realised they needed help to take the business to a higher level. A key meeting seven years ago helped that happen. “We were breaking even for many years but we never seemed to be able to get profitable,” she says. “We knew that to become leaders in our world we would have to have a mentor. We really wanted someone who had retail experience, was self-taught as well. They’re the best to learn from.”
That person was Craig Kimberley, founder of The Just Group. Danny was at a meeting where Kimberley was the speaker. “Through a friend of a friend of a friend we got his assistant’s number and Danny went and had coffee with him and they clicked. He’s been on that journey with us, which is fantastic.”
Danny and Kimberley would meet for coffee every few months. “After a year he came in and met me,” Guest says. “We wanted to have more regular mentorship.” They set up a board of directors, with Kimberley as chairman.
The business has grown beyond Guest’s expectations. She had thought 50 shops would be enough.
“I remember being on holiday once. We were at a resort where everyone sits together and we were all talking about our businesses,” she says. “We were at that time quite small – about 30 stores. I think I was speaking to someone who owned a pharmacy in Canada, 200 stores, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that overwhelm you, 200 stores?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s really one store times 200’. And I went, ‘Oh’ – that just changed my whole outlook.”
Guest’s social conscience has meant her philanthropic urgings have been activated in parallel with her business. “Because my mum was so heavily involved [in various charities], it just was a natural thing,” she says of her desire to help others.
The spark came in 1991. “I was pregnant with [second daughter] Indi and World Vision came on the television and I remember being really distressed by it all. I thought, ‘If I’m bringing a child into the world I’m going to try to save one’.
“I had two girls and I sponsored a son. Five years later I found out my son was a girl. The paperwork was wrong.”
For Guest, reaching out was natural. “We knew you can’t just be successful yourself, there needs to be another purpose to it. We wanted a strong and profitable business but we thought we could do things that could help those less fortunate.
“When we started opening stores we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the managers chose the child that they sponsored?’. Now every store sponsors a child.”
In 2002 the Guests partnered with World Vision to support its projects around the world, including in Cambodia and Uganda.
Guest has a particular interest in helping women “to be self-sufficient and start their own businesses”.
“We know that when you become independent – which I’ve been able to enjoy and be in charge of the destiny of my own life and future – it just changes your world. It’s possible for anyone to do.”
World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello says Blue Illusion’s work has helped transform the lives of countless women and children: “It is partners like Donna and Danny that strengthen World Vision’s ability to work with communities around the world and help them break out of the cycle of poverty.”
On a holiday in Bali, Guest’s attention was drawn to an orphanage she visited with two of her daughters.
“The woman who ran it was Indonesian, married to an Australian,” she says. “They told me about how they came to own this orphanage and it was so heart-warming. I said, ‘I wish I could be you but I don’t think I could ever do it myself – but I could financially help’.
“With our support and the support of others they built an orphanage for 60 children [called Bali Life] and used the old orphanage to help street mums.”
Blue Illusion has so far donated $670,000 to various projects. How has Guest’s philanthropic work changed her? “It makes you happy.”
The Guests, who now live in Brighton, have four children – Keshia, 25, Indiana, 23, Shafaye, 20 and Zach, 19. I ask how her French is. “My daughter said, ‘Mum, if you want to avoid dementia, which runs in our family, you’d best learn a language. And you’ve started French so many times’.”
She can practise on her three business trips to France each year, immersing herself in the culture she loves.
Perfect day? “South of France, and I’m fed good food and I’ve got sun on my face. That’s where I get my chill.”
The chill is where I go as I leave her St Kilda office for Melbourne’s fickle weather. But her story of giving back has had a distinctly warming effect.
Juliette Binoche wears \ Blue Illusion stretch silk print dress $249.95.
