Ep 1 - My Story and How I Got Here

Welcome to the very first episode of The Jane Mow Show. Before we dive into style, personal brand and presence, I wanted to take you behind the scenes and share how I got here.

In this episode, I'm sharing the career journey that took me from styling television presenters, commercial advertising campaigns and fashion magazines to becoming a Personal Brand Stylist helping ambitious women align their image with who they're becoming.

You'll hear the experiences that shaped the way I think about style, the turning points that changed the direction of my career, and why I believe style has very little to do with clothes - and everything to do with confidence, perception and identity.

Because after nearly two decades in this industry, one thing has become very clear:

What you wear changes how people see you.

But more importantly, it changes how you see yourself.

This episode is for you if...
You've ever looked at your life and thought, "There has to be something more than this." If you're in the middle of building something, changing direction, reinventing yourself or figuring out your next chapter, I hope this episode reminds you that sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from following the nudge you can't ignore.

In this episode, we talk about:

• My career in television styling and what it taught me about trust, perception and first impressions

• Why clothing is one of the most powerful communication tools we have

• The lessons I learned working in commercial advertising and how brands use image to influence behaviour

• My dream role as Fashion Editor at Mindfood Style Magazine

• Why fashion trends alone don't create personal style

• The burnout that forced me to rethink my career and start again

• The counselling session that unexpectedly changed the direction of my future

• How I transitioned into personal styling for women in business

• Why I evolved from Personal Stylist to Personal Brand Stylist

• The philosophy behind What You Wear Is Your Business Card®

• What you can expect from future episodes of The Jane Mow Show

Episode Chapters

00:00 – Welcome to The Jane Mow Show

02:00 – Why Style Is Never Really About Clothes

04:00 – My Career in Television Styling

07:00 – What Television Taught Me About Perception

08:45 – Commercial Styling & The Psychology of Image

10:45 – Becoming Fashion Editor at Mindfood Style

13:00 – Why Fashion Isn't the Same as Personal Style

14:30 – Burnout, Corporate Life & Starting Again

16:00 – The Counselling Session That Changed Everything

17:30 – The Evolution Into Personal Brand Styling

18:30 – What You Wear Is Your Business Card®

19:00 – Why This Podcast Exists

20:00 – Final Thoughts & What's Coming Next

Join The Style Shop (Waitlist)
Ready to turn inspiration into action? The Style Shop is a growing library of bite-sized style tools, trainings and practical resources designed to help you confidently apply everything we talk about on The Jane Mow Show.

👉 Join the waitlist: https://janemow.com/shop

Free Resource
If you've ever looked at your wardrobe and felt like something isn't quite working - but you can't put your finger on what it is - I've created a free guide to help.

Download my free guide:

The 6 Style Mistakes That Are Diluting Your Personal Brand and Keeping You From Being Seen at Your Next Level.

👉 www.janemow.com/mistakes

Connect with Jane
Instagram: @janemowstylist 

LinkedIn: Jane Mow

Website: www.janemow.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

First podcast. Oh my goodness. Welcome. Welcome if you've been following me for a while on Instagram. I've been talking about launching a podcast for a very long time. Probably about uh, I think I'd say maybe like a year and a half. Oh, uh let's be real, like three years. This first episode, I want to go a little bit deeper because, you know, before all the good stuff and all the stuff that's coming up, I just want you to know who you're actually listening to. Like, who the hell is Jane Mo? Why should I be listening to her? Why does she care so much about the topic of style and personal branding? And more importantly, how did she get here? Here's the thing though, you know, you could follow anyone for style advice. There are like millions of accounts out there. You know, you got your Instagram, your YouTube, your TikTok, millions of podcasts, millions of people telling you what to wear. So I want you to understand what makes me different, what makes the way I think about style different from other people. And that starts with my story. Aloha! Welcome to the Jane Mo Show, the go-to podcast for women who are ready to feel good in what they wear and show up confident, powerful, and ready to dominate. I'm Jane Mo, personal brain stylist, style coach, and trusted image consultant for ambitious women worldwide. With nearly two decades of experience styling women across Australia, the US, and Europe, I help my clients translate their identity into their wardrobe so that they show up with credibility, confidence, and commanding presence. What you wear is more than just clothes. What you wear is your business card. It's how you make your mark, command attention, and leave an unforgettable impression. Each week, I'll be bringing real life insights and practical advice to help you elevate the way you show up. And if you're feeling disconnected from how you're showing up and can't quite articulate exactly what's not working, be sure to grab my free guide, the six style mistakes that are diluting your personal brand and keeping you from being seen at your next level. Head over to the link in the show notes below or visit janemo.com forward slash mistakes to grab your copy. Let's get started with today's episode. Now, the one thing I've come to know to be true after nearly two decades in this world of style and styling is style is never really about clothes. I know, I know, coming from a stylist that sounds a little bit cray cray. Like, what are you talking about? You you tell people what to wear, you're all about clothes. But stay with me because whether I was dressing TV presenters, working on commercial campaigns, or styling pages in fashion magazines, the same thing kept coming up over and over again. What we wear changes how people see us. But more importantly, it changes how we see ourselves. It changes how we show up, how confident we feel, and how much space we allow ourselves to take up. And over the years, I've had so many beautiful conversations with brilliant, successful women who've invested to work with me because they knew something felt off. Their wardrobe just didn't reflect who they were anymore. They've outgrown that wardrobe. They'd open their wardrobe every morning and feel nothing. You know that feeling when you look at your wardrobe and it's energy draining instead of lifting you up. Yeah, that feeling. These women also recognized that they had evolved, but their clothes were still stuck in like 2010. It hadn't caught up to the level of authority that they were playing at and wanted to portray. So let me take you through my journey, how I got here, what shapes the way I think about image and identity, and why this work means so much to me. So before I became a personal brain stylist, my background was actually in television and media. I started out styling television presenters. So think the like of like 60 Minutes, Sky Sports, Prime News, all the big names. I freaking loved it. Absolutely loved it. I met some incredible people that opened doors for me in this world of style. But here's what most people don't realize about that world television styling is not just about making someone look nice. It's very strategic. You're always working to a brief. I'd walk into a room with producers and they'd say things like, Jane, we need people to feel warm, to warm up to this presenter. We need people to trust her. We kind of need to make her look soft to the audience so that they can lean in and listen to a message. You know, other things I would say was would be like, we need them to not click away to another channel in the first 10 seconds. So my job was to make that all happen through the art of clothing, styling, and the outfits I was putting together. Different colors for different audiences, different fabrics for different shows. Like, you know, the 6 p.m. news looks nothing like the sports commentators on a Sunday afternoon. Okay, so morning show energy is completely different to late night news energy. I was always thinking about the tiny details, the structure of a jacket, the weight of a fabric, whether an outfit worked with the background, whether a color was going to read warm or cool on screen. If you wanted an audience to feel happy, you'd use certain colors and fabric. And if it was a serious show, you'd dress in more somber colors. And let me tell you, the audience always had an opinion, by the way. Like people would write in. I mean, the feedback that came my way in real time was like unreal. You know, the the the opinions from the presenter's mom, the actual host of the show, their mom and their or their aunt, to the Karen that's a keyboard warrior, writing into the network to say exactly how she feels about someone's outfit. Seriously, these people. Anyway, I had to learn who to listen to and whose opinion belonged in the bin. Now that's gonna be a future episode, by the way. I think we need to cover, you know, who to listen to and who to just go, you know what? I'm just gonna walk past you because you've got to look yourself in the mirror because you don't have any experience telling you what to wear. Okay. So we're gonna cover that in future episodes. How to walk away from negative people and negative opinions about how we dress. Anyway, let's move on. So, what I started to notice when I was working as a stylist in television was that people make decisions about what they see incredibly fast. Back then it was seven seconds. We didn't have so much, you know, digital noise back then as we do now. You know, now you're actually just bombarded with so much information, right? Now that number seven seconds is down to three seconds. That was really the first time I started to understand that clothing is actually a communication tool. Before you speak, your image has already said something. The question is, my friend, what is it saying for you? From television, I moved into commercial styling. So think TV commercials, advertising campaigns, music videos. Television was where I first understood perception. Commercials and advertising was where image became truly strategic for me. Because in advertising, nothing, my friend, is random, like nothing. Every single detail, every color, every cut, every fabric has been chosen deliberately to create a feeling, a perception, a message, a story. So think about ads you see on TV, like uh brands from Apple to Uber Eats. You know, everything you're seeing has been crafted to make you feel something to evoke an emotion in you. So you end up wanting to buy that product. The camera angles, the lighting, the clothes people are wearing all tell a story, and they're specifically chosen to shift something in you emotionally. So you then want to go and buy that product. Being a commercial advertising stylist was like being a costume designer for movies. My job as a commercial advertising stylist, quite a mouthful, was to build characters visually. So before an actor would say a word, I needed to communicate who exactly who they were through what they were wearing. There was always a narrative to be told. That's why, if you zoom out a little, jobs like costume designers exist for movies. These costume designers build characters through what the character wears. They tell the story of their character through their clothing before the character says anything. And at some point, I had this like clear aha moment when I was do when I was in this niche of styling. I was like, oh my goodness, we are doing the exact same thing, but in real life, we're telling a story in what we wear. Whether we're aware of whether we are aware of it or not, people are constantly reading visual cues. So the way you walk into a room tells a story about your confidence, your energy, your authority, your personality, your self-respect. And sometimes there's a disconnection. Working in that world made me deeply, deeply aware of just how powerful image really is. Then came the beautiful world of magazine. So, yes, this was the moment that I thought I had arrived, my friend. I had arrived, and I, when I tell you this was like my dream job, it was when it was handed to me, I thought to myself, my God, what am I going to do with myself? Anywho, while I was styling a photo shoot for Mind Food magazine as a freelance stylist, the editor for Mind Food approached me about becoming a fashion editor with something that they were launching called Mind Food Style. That magazine still exists today. You can buy it off the shelves. And I was like, yes, oh my God, let's go. Dream job, let's go. So I stepped into the fashion editorial world and I was completely obsessed. Every editorial magazine stylist who's listening to this knows exactly what I'm talking about, right? I mean, you get to see your work in print and you get to see it all laid out, beautifully created, beautifully curated. I genuinely loved the creativity of that world. Like, you know, you get got to shoot with some amazing teams around the world. But here's where the shift started happening for me. My job as fashion editor was really to tell women what they should be buying. And I started to notice that just because something was fashionable didn't mean it was right for that person wearing it. I was giving generic advice to the masses, like generic, trend-driven advice that had nothing to do with someone's actual personality, had nothing to do with their identity, their lifestyle, or where they were going in life. I was basically like an influencer, but my title was a fashion editor for mind food style. But my job was to influence people to buy these things, these products that were that were in for the season. And I still see the same thing today. Women consuming endless style content online from influencers now that exist on our phones, you know, and women saving outfits, following trends from these influencers, trying to recreate what looks good on someone else and not feeling like themselves when they put it on. Here's the thing style without identity and your personality will always feel disconnected. Always. So eventually I started craving something more, something with meaning. I loved the creative side of that industry, but I needed my work to have purpose. And here's where it gets real. Burnout hit, end of 2015. I was finishing up at Minefood and making the move to Sydney, and I hit a wall. Like someone else was had control over my time, someone had control over my income, all of it. And I looked at my life and thought, I need to completely rethink how I'm working. So I took a step back and went back to corporate, took a nine to five job, I took a couple years off to think about my next move in this world of style. And around the same time, my now partner, who you might know from Instagram, Bay, he's in the next room, by the way, probably listening to this. Anywho, we were going through couples counseling and I was feeling really deflated about my life. You know, like the feeling when you, when you, when you're a creative and nothing is happening, and you just feel like, oh my God, I feel like this life is so mundane. And the counselor kind of turned around and was like, look, do you have a project that you could focus on? Is there anything that you want to do that could take your mind off feeling mundane? And I turned around and I said, Well, actually, I've been thinking about going back into the world of style because I feel like I have unfinished business. And she was like, Well, maybe there should be a project. Go focus on that. And let me tell you, my friend, I walked out of their counseling session. I went home and I freaking made a plan. Because, you know, I'm a Taipei personality, Capricorn. I have to have a plan. So anyway, I nutted it all down and I was like, I need to do all these things to be able to, you know, launch a website, hire a brand designer, because I was going to have to rebrand to being a personal stylist for women in business. So I thought to myself, when I go back and when I when I launch my website, I need to be, you know, all guns blazing with like a business coach and all that stuff. So anyway, I ended up working seven days a week, took up a casual position in retail to be able to make sure there was enough funds to fund everybody. My team basically was going to help me launch as their personal brand stylist. As a personal stylist at the time, I was just focusing on personal styling for women. And then I went back through all my personal styling clients I had while I was at Mindfood magazine, Mindfood Style, and while I was in television, I had a few women reach out to me. There was like a handful of women I was served servicing on the side, personal clients. And I went back through the emails and I thought to myself, what is the pattern? What is the thing that they kept on asking me to do? One of the things that kept coming up was, can you make me look the part? Can you help me dress for this meeting? So I thought to myself, okay, cool. That's where I'm going to start. And I'm going to, that's where I think because I had service women in corporate and in business, that's where my natural sort of interest was. So I went down that road of my personal styling for women in business, executive founders, you know, women in corporate. So when I went back through my emails and when I researched my previous clients, I started notice something. It wasn't just about clothes that they were asking me to put into their wardrobe. It was about the connection between how they dressed, how they carried themselves, and how they felt walking into a room. Their confidence, their visibility, and the way people received them. One of these women is still with me, still my client today, 13 years later. Shout out to Kath. Thank you so much. You're amazing. So yeah, that counseling session with my partner changed everything for me. It lit a fire in me. Over time, I realized the term personal stylist didn't quite capture what I actually do because my work became so much bigger. It was deeper than just clothes. When I started working specifically with women in business, CEOs, founders, speakers, coaches, leaders who were stepping into bigger rooms, I kept seeing the same thing over and over again. These women, they weren't lacking intelligence. They weren't lacking ambition. They weren't lacking capability. But the way they were showing up no longer matched who they were becoming. There was a gap. And they felt it. And that's when my work really evolved for me into personal brainstyling. Because your image is not separate from the way you lead, okay? And the way you communicate, the way you position yourself in the world. What you wear is your business card. That's actually a slogan I trademarked because I believe in it so much. Every time you step out into the world, people are forming an opinion about you. Not in a mean way, it's just human instinct. We are wired that way. We are wired to read visual information first and make a decision about what to think. So whether you're walking into a boardroom, showing up on a Zoom call, or just grabbing coffee, you are your own billboard, your own mascot for your brand. What you wear is your business card. And that's really why this podcast exists. It's not a show about fashion, about the latest trends. We're going to talk about visibility. We're going to talk about identity. We're going to talk about confidence. We're going to talk about personal evolution. We're going to talk about business, career, how we want to feel in our clothes, all of it. Because how we show up on the outside is always connected to what's happening on the inside. I want this to feel like a real life conversation. You, me, sitting down with a cup of tea, maybe a glass of wine, I don't know. Take your pick, whatever the time of day is, and having a beautiful, deep, meaningful conversation about clothes. The things that matter, the things nobody really talks about, the version of yourself you're stepping into and whether the world is actually seeing her right now. So if you're listening to this and you feel like you're in a season of growth, like you're evolving and you want the way you show up to evolve with you, you're in exactly the right place, my friend. I am so glad you're here. And I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this episode. If this episode resonated with you, I'd absolutely love for you to share it, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or send it to someone who might be struggling and needs to hear it. If you want to connect with me further, you can find all the links in the show notes below. Until next time, keep showing up as the woman you were always meant to be, my friend. I'll see you in the next episode.