This year, Dress For Success Auckland celebrates 25 years of empowering women in Aotearoa to gain economic independence. With over 24,5000 women going through its doors in that time, Dress For Success not only helps women look the part, it helps them have the tools, resources and confidence to achieve their career goals. To celebrate this milestone, we talk to one of their former clients, Bhargavi (Arkie) Addappa, about her road from poverty to success.
For the first two decades of Arkie Addappa’s life, it was all about survival. Growing up in poverty in Hyderabad in India, she shared a clay hut with five other family members. “It was about the size of this,” she says now, gesturing to her Auckland home office. “When the monsoons would come, the roof would cave in and we would have to rebuild,” she laughs. “It was always an adventure.”
Arkie’s family was living day by day, her mother and grandmother worked as maids to survive and keep the family going. As Arkie’s younger aunt became the first woman in the family to finish her schooling, the family had hoped she would then go on to get a white collar job and help the family step up to a better life.
Unfortunately, Arkie’s aunt chose her freedom, dropped out of college and eloped with her boyfriend. This shattered the family dreams. The family feared that Arkie would follow in the same footsteps – so they banned her from wearing nice clothes, going to places, in case she caught male attention, and then they became abusive. “All these people who raised me, who fed me, became very insecure and they started beating me,” Arkie says. “It wasn’t a good place to be; I tried to kill myself a couple of times.”
Arkie kept studying, believing that if she finished her education and got an office job, her family would start to trust her. But even as a star pupil, her extended family members kept beating her. Finally, after her eldest aunt stabbed her in the back, Arkie fled to her mother’s work and begged for help to escape.
Her mother was already working two jobs to support the family and in order to fund Arkie’s education in Melbourne, she pledged her gold, released her retirement savings and broke her life insurance. This would pay for Arkie’s first semester at university, to do a business degree.
To keep paying for the rest of her classes, Arkie started fruit picking – the frigid winters of Melbourne a sharp contrast to her humid hometown, and the frostbite in her hands often made them so locked that she couldn’t bring her fingers together to eat food. But she kept going, and the elusive white-collar job turned up – just before her visa in Australia ended, and she was forced to return to India.
When Arkie tells this story now, on the other side of it, sitting in a home she owns after years of working in Aotearoa, two things are clear. One, the memory of where she has come from is still very clear to her and two, it has not broken her spirit. Arkie is a delight; reading through that biography, you would think ‘well, hard to find a joke in there’ but she manages, at one stage in the re-telling, pointing out that “none of the nine million gods in Hindu religion felt like they were helping me out?” But divine intervention did finally occur – just when Arkie was hitting her lowest point back in India, her visa to New Zealand was approved.
Dress For Success
Sitting behind Arkie in her home office is a richly textured wall hanging from Rajasthan and, above that, a riotously colourful painting of flowers, so vibrant that it’s hard not to stare. It’s called ‘Joy of Life’ and Arkie painted it – for years, it sat on the wall in the Dress For Success offices, as a thank you for the help they gave her. Because once she arrived in New Zealand, her life changed very fast.
“I used all of those failures as rocket fuel – once I came to New Zealand, the focus I had… I tell you, I could have won any battle, you could send me to space, I could have done anything,” she laughs. “I had this fierce discipline of ‘I have to make it.’”
She completed an executive level MBA – Saturday and Sunday classes, 8am to 8pm, all while working during the week. It was a two-year degree, which she finished in 13 months. “I was planning three months ahead,” she says. A good job quickly followed, but even though Arkie knew she had the skills, she wasn’t at the level she wanted and she couldn’t win the respect of her male manager. That’s when she first heard of Dress For Success.
“A good friend drove me to the appointment and before I got out of the car, he said to me, ‘Is this just about clothes? Because I’ll buy you the clothes,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘It’s not just about the clothes, it’s about my identity. Because I’m so good at what I do, but this guy is not giving me a break, he’s not giving me the title, he’s not giving me the promotion. He doesn’t believe in me and it’s affecting my self-confidence.’”
During her fitting appointment, Arkie told the team at Dress For Success about her story and they told her about the other workshops they offered at their career centre, starting with a bias workshop. “I went along, and it was the first time I learned about what are the different biases you come across as in the workplace, the first time I saw how my boss, my manager, my stakeholders see me,” she says. “It was an ‘oh my god’ kaboom moment in my head.”
More workshops followed – Dress For Success offers different courses in resilience, CV assistance and more, and Arkie attended them all, including the personality workshop where she learned she was a born leader.
“You can only connect the dots in your life from the back, not from the front,” she says. “I could never understand why I fought with my family so much about justice, about why women are treated like second-class citizens and why I always ended up in leadership roles in my life. That day was the ‘aha moment’ I needed, where I realised ‘okay, I am good at this. I am a leader.’”
Workshop by workshop, Arkie’s confidence grew. As well as learning business skills, the Dress For Success team taught her about clothing, about colour and style. After growing up in a family that was afraid that nice clothes brought danger, Arkie said she had no idea how to dress. The centre also offers confidence building sessions, which helped rebuild her self-esteem and “own her awesomeness,” Arkie beams.
Within 6 months of joining Dress for Success and attending their workshops, Arkie was able to secure a role where she negotiated the salary and the job title. For the first time in life, Arkie felt like she made it, from a poor family, a family of maids, a fruit picker to a six-figure corporate job and a management position.
But it wasn’t just professional success that she created, Arkie also created a home life for herself in New Zealand as well – marrying a Kiwi, buying a house and even being able to enjoy some leisure time, all things that seemed so far away when she started. Her love of painting returned, and when she got that big job, she gifted her Joy of Life painting to Dress For Success to thank them.
In May this year, Robyn Moore, Executive Manager Dress for Success Auckland called Arkie into her office and mentioned some volunteering opportunities. “I was thinking, ‘Okay will she be asking me to dust the corners of the office,’” Arkie jokes. “But she said to me, ‘You know the painting you gave us? We have people currently bidding on it, how would you feel if we put it up for auction as part of our 25th year celebration?”
But by now, you know that Arkie is the kind of woman that isn’t going to stop at one painting – she offered to paint a full gallery for the auction, which will take place at the Dress For Success Gala Event this month. She picks up the different pieces in her office – some of which she is still working on. Her paintings represent the journey – with names like ‘Flow’, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Breakthrough’, they’re there to document her rise and rise from poverty.
That journey, she says, has been hard. “Growing up in this poor family and being raised in an environment where women are treated like second class citizens, I was the first woman in my family to finish my studies, to leave home, to leave the country,” she says.
“To go from being a fruit picker to having a six-figure income and now being an emerging artist, but then to have the health battles, it’s a reminder of what matters. Because I grew up in so much poverty, I was so focused on having a good source of income, a stable job, on having a home, a husband and money. But last year, with a few health scares, I’ve realized the definition of success is not money, it’s not status. It’s about having a healthy, happy life with your loved ones.”
With her life story, Arkie strongly believes that where you start in life doesn’t have to dictate where you end up. “We are not defined by the place we are born, the environment and conditions we grew up in, the education, wealth or power. We are purely defined by the power of our dreams, and positive steps we take in that path. Don’t stop, don’t give up and do not stop until you fly high, savoring the success of your dreams.”
Dress For Success is an organization that goes beyond just clothing; The organisation and its 89 active volunteers, some of whom have been with DfSA since its inception, help to assist anyone who identifies as a woman at her point of need – through all manner of support, from helping with CVs, one on one coaching, job interviews to clothing for court appearances and housing appointments. It also offers a two-year wrap-around career support programme to help women retain their employment and advance in their careers. For more information about DfSA visit www.auckland.dressforsuccess.org